Ernest Hemingway, Who Narrowly Survived Two Plane Crashes Just the Year Before, and Who Died by Suicide, Reflects on Death: ?Maybe we are only alive when we are dead but I have not believed that for a long time.? (In an unpublished letter of Hemingway, offered here for the first time, a remarkable statement of Hemingway on the religious afterlife)

?When you are dead you are dead for a long time."?He advises a young woman friend, ?Please be careful about aircraft?It is one of the great pleasures of life but you pay off accordingly.??Hemingway will send her an animal skin from his African safari to decorate her new house"?Our trophies ( sic ) were shipped July 18th from Mombassa via Amsterdam to be trans-shipped to NY and then here."After covering the Spanish Civil War, in 1939 Hemingway purchased Finca Vig?a (?Lookout Farm?), an unpretentious estate outside Havana, Cuba. In 1940 he published ?For Whom the Bell Tolls?, which many consider his best book. All of his life Hemingway was fascinated by war - in ?A Farewell to Arms? he focused on its pointlessness, and in ?For Whom the Bell Tolls? on the comradeship it creates. During World War II, he flew several missions with the Royal Air Force and landed with American troops on D-Day. He saw a good deal of action in Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. He also participated in the liberation of Paris. Following the war in Europe, Hemingway returned to his home in Cuba and turned his attention to writing again. He also traveled widely, and at the end of their 1953-1954 African safari, the Hemingways survived a near-fatal plane crash, only to have their rescue plane crash the very next day. Though they survived the second crash as well, newspapers around the world carried brought the details to the reading public.Soon after, he received the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for ?The Old Man and the Sea?, a short heroic novel about an old Cuban fisherman who, after an extended struggle, hooks and boats a giant marlin only to have it eaten by voracious sharks during the voyage home. That book also played a role in gaining for Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. It ran in its entirety in five million copies of Life Magazine, and the 50,000 copies printed in book form sold out in ten days.In 1955, back in Cuba, Hemingway turned fifty-five and tried to follow his doctors? advice by reducing his drinking. In October it is announced that he has been awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. All of his wife?s? efforts to protect his privacy were sabotaged by the crush of worldwide press and the fact that Hemingway invited any and all to the Finca Vigia to visit. In the summer of 1955 he was working on the filming of ?The Old Man and the Sea? starring Spencer Tracy. The pace of people and press, of lunches and drinking, finally takes its toll and in the autumn of 1955 Hemingway took to his bed for two months, suffering from hepatitis and nephritis.Hemingway's relationship with faith was complicated. Raised protestant, he converted to catholicism but was largely religiously indifferent. He had seen so much death and tragedy. At this point evidently, he had long since abandoned the faith of his youth.Mary Lou Firle, a second year student at CCNY, was in Cuba in early 1955. Before she left she bet a friend that she would have Ernest Hemingway sign the book she had, ?Farewell to Arms.? She picked up the phone and called Ernest Hemingway. When he answered she introduced herself and added, ?I have a friend at Fordham University.? Hemingway immediately assumed the friend was Prof. Bob Brown who had been in touch with Hemingway on several occasions. Brown was writing a book or articles about Hemingway. Hemingway told Mary Lou that his wife Mary was away and he had to entertain visitors from the French Embassy that afternoon. He asked her if she would come to his home and help him. Mary Lou agreed and Hemingway sent his driver to pick her up.After the meeting the group drove her back to Havana. Hemingway invited her back the next day for lunch and sent his driver to pick her up. They spent the afternoon talking. She had told him of her family background, that her parents were born in Germany. Since she had been at Veradero Beach for a week she had a deep tan, and Hemingway called her the ?Black Kraut.? The reason for the nickname, He.…