‘Dear Poppa’

The JFK library in Boston will soon display a letter J.D. Salinger wrote to Ernest Hemingway from a German hospital during the Second World War. “It was the summer of 1946 when a young and war-fatigued J.D. Salinger reached out to another writer whose career had also been shaped by war, a writer he had arranged to meet while both had been in Europe. ‘The talks I had with you here were the only hopeful minutes of the whole business,’ Salinger writes at the close of his letter to Ernest Hemingway, which will be displayed publicly for the first time on Sunday at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The letter, which has been available to and referenced by scholars over the years, is part of the Ernest Hemingway collection that has been kept at the JFK Library for 30 years. It offers a fascinating glimpse of a sardonic Salinger, then serving in the Army, in the period before the 1951 publication of ‘Catcher in the Rye.'”