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NICK SCHIFRIN: Now Jeffrey Brown has a look at a decades-old, but newly released short story by Ernest Hemingway.
JEFFREY BROWN: August, 1944, French and Allied troops marched down the Champs Elysees, the City of Light liberated from Nazi occupiers. Embedded with the soldiers, a giant of American literature, Ernest Hemingway. Twelve years later, Hemingway would capture the mood and the moment in a short story that bears the hallmarks of his classic works. Now "A Room on the Garden Side" has been published for the first time, in the literary magazine "The Strand."
Managing editor, Andrew Gulli: It starts with a bunch of soldiers and they're sitting in the Ritz Hotel, and they're drinking. And you could tell that they have gone through a stressful experience because they have just marched into Paris after Paris was liberated from the Nazis. So you see there's all this laughter of men who had fought at battle and in essence relieving stress. But then there's also beneath that some sadness and some pathos for the men who didn't make it.
JEFFREY BROWN: It was in 1956 that Hemingway sent word to his publisher of five new short stories he'd written: "I suppose they are a little shocking since they deal with irregular troops in combat and with people who actually kill people. Anyway, you can always publish them after I'm dead." The story set unpublished, though known to scholars. Hemingway committed suicide five years later, in 1961.
ANDREW GULLI: If this manuscript was just submitted to me as is, I probably would have published it, because it was just, it had a lot of typical themes of an Ernest Hemingway story. There is the theme of war, the theme of bravery, the theme of mortality, nostalgia for a time that has gone by.
JEFFREY BROWN: The nostalgia dates all the way back to Hemingway's life as a young man in Paris in the 1920s, a heyday when he socialized with writers and artists, like Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Pablo Picasso. His memoir, "A Moveable Feast," published posthumously, captures that period. The newly published story takes place in the Ritz Hotel, one of Hemingway's frequent haunts. The hotel's bar is now named after its most famous patron. Kirk Curnutt is a board member of the Hemingway Foundation and Society.
KIRK CURNUTT, Hemingway Foundation and Society: Paris was absolutely crucial to his artistic sense of himself. That was the place where he found his voice. I think he always looked at the liberation of Paris in 1944 as asking himself, what would have happened had Paris been permanently lost to the Nazis? So it's a very personal question for him. And I think, at the end of the life, as he's going back over those early years and calculating the loss of aging and the loss of his first wife, he's really identifying in that period with the city itself.
JEFFREY BROWN: Hemingway's life and adventures often inspired his works. His time as a young ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I figured in his first novel, "A Farewell to Arms." He captured his experience as an expat in Europe in "The Sun Also Rises," and during the Spanish Civil War in "For Whom the Bell Tolls." By the time he wrote "A Room on the Garden Side" in 1956, Hemingway was world famous, but sinking into a deep depression.
KIRK CURNUTT: He was really struggling at this moment in his career. He had been through two plane crashes in two consecutive days a couple of years earlier. He was struggling to finish several large, voluminous projects. And so I think he was in Paris about this time. And what's interesting to me is, he was really writing the story around the same time he began writing "A Moveable Feast," so it's inexorably connected with what most people consider one of his two or three greatest works.
JEFFREY BROWN: Hemingway's short story is just the latest lost work to be excavated by "The Strand," which previously published unseen pieces by writers like John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Andrew Gulli, is it the fun of it? Is there something more that we learn about these authors?
ANDREW GULLI: I would say it's partly the fun of it. Ever since I was a kid, I was the kid who was bothering my mom, saying, hey, mom, wouldn't it be great if Robert Louis Stevenson was alive, and I could be discussing "Treasure Island" with him? So, to me, I love to have that bridge between the past and the present with these writers. And it's a nice thing to have a writer who was a very talented writer, to have some contemporary readers today try to compare their experience reading their work today to how they felt when they're reading it, let's say, in high school or 30 years ago.
JEFFREY BROWN: For the "PBS NewsHour," I'm Jeffrey Brown.
