Hemingway aficionados will be thrilled to hear that a new novel from the master will be published to coincide with the centenary of his birth next July.
Surely some mistake. Hem died 37 years ago when he blew his head off at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, just before his 62nd birthday.
But since that time, an 850-page manuscript dating from his last safari in East Africa has been lying in a locked vault in the Kennedy Library in Boston. An edited version will be the "new" novel, to be called True At First Light.
The publisher, Charles Scribner III, says this is definitely the last full-length book which Hemingway left behind. Other unfinished books at the time of his death were later published, such as A Moveable Feast and The Garden of Eden.
The job of cutting the 200,000 words of the last of the Hemingway canon is being done by the writer's son, Patrick, who, it is hard to believe, is now 70.
He has said he is not changing any of his father's words but has to reshape the original as he cuts it down. He has taken the title from a passage in the text where Hem wrote: "In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain."
Patrick was actually on the safari which forms the kernel of the book. He had graduated from Harvard in art history and had settled in then Tanganyika as a white game hunter. He and his wife joined Hem and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, a former Time- Life correspondent.
Some 20 year earlier, Hem had also gone on safari in East Africa with his second wife, Pauline, following his divorce from Hedley, wife number one. After Pauline had come Martha Gellhorn, who had aroused his jealousy as she became a distinguished war correspondent.
The autobiographical novel dwells on these tangled relationships as well as "age and enlightenment, spirituality and the hypnotic spell of Africa", according to Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times, who has spoken to Patrick about his editing task.
The hunting scenes from the manuscript were serialised in Sports Illustrated back in 19711972 as Hemingway's African Journal. They accounted for about a quarter of the manuscript on which Hemingway worked when he returned to Cuba from the safari. He had to abandon it when he went to Peru as a consultant for the filming of The Old Man and the Sea, which had helped win him the Nobel Prize for literature.
The safari was an amazing series of misadventures with an interlude where the writer "went native" - to use his wife's words - to take on an African "fiancee" or "bride".
This was Debba of the Wakamba tribe, whose physical attributes Hem compared favourably to Marilyn Monroe's. When "Miss Mary", as his white wife was called, returned from a trip to Nairobi, she found that the "wedding" ceremonies had been so vigorous that the marital bed had been broken.
She does not seem to have been put out and had even advised Hem in advance that Debba "ought first to have a much-needed bath".
There was also a lot of drink consumed on the safari. Denis Zaphiro was the game warden assigned to Hem for the hunting expeditions and he later testified that the writer was "drunk the whole time".
"He just became merrier, more lovable, more bull-shitty. Without drink he was morose, silent and depressed."
It will be interesting to see how Zaphiro is treated in the safari novel. Hem and Mary had nicknamed him "G-C", for gincrazed.
It's a wonder they hit any wildlife at all. Hem was so drunk one day that he fell out of the LandRover. He unsportingly claimed several kills that were really the work of his Cuban friend, Mario Monocal.
Mary was fascinated by a blackmaned lion and was determined to bag it. With the help of Hem and Zaphiro she killed it. You can see its skin on the floor of the Hemingway Room in the Kennedy Library.
It was later on this trip that Hem and Mary survived not one, but two air crashes. After the first, he was believed dead and was able to read his obituaries. He was not impressed.
He was puzzled by the references to him "seeking death" all his life, pointing out that if this was so it was strange that he had not found it before reaching 54.
But the second crash had almost killed him, although he did not get proper medical care until weeks later. His drinking was already destroying his liver but on top of that he suffered two cracked spinal discs, a ruptured liver and kidney, paralysis of the sphincter, and a dislocated right arm and shoulder. His skull was broken open so that the brain fluid escaped.
Yet he still managed to write 200,000 words about that safari and the meaning of life as he saw it. It was part of the personal papers that Mary flew to Cuba to recover after his suicide. Fidel Castro had taken over but she asked President Kennedy's help to allow her to travel there.
That is why the Hemingway Library is part of the Kennedy Library looking out over Boston Harbour.
Hemingway was too ill with depression to attend Kennedy's inauguration to which he had been invited. Mary has described how he broke down and wept when, after hours of effort, he was unable to write a few sentences of tribute to Kennedy for a special volume.