At Nate D. Sanders Auctions, a 4-page letter from Ernest Hemingway was sold: in it, an American writer mentions two plane crashes that he had while traveling to Africa. As part of the auction, 9 letters from the prose writer were put up for auction, of which only two lots found their buyers: one went under the hammer for 6.8 thousand dollars, but the second in question was bought for 237 thousand dollars. The letter is dated April 17, 1954 (the year 1953 is erroneously indicated at the beginning of the text) and addressed to lawyer Alfred Rice. The writer told him about his injuries: rupture of the kidney, damage to the spleen and severe bleeding.
In 1954, Hemingway, while traveling in Africa with his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, booked a sightseeing flight over the Belgian Congo. Approaching the Murchison Falls, the plane crashed into a pole. Hemingway suffered head injuries and his wife had two broken ribs. When they went to Entebbe for medical attention the next day, their plane exploded during takeoff. This time, the injuries were much more serious.
When they got to Entebbe, it turned out that Hemingway had already been buried: in the following days, the writer reread obituaries about himself. 1954 is also significant in that in October Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Injuries prevented him from making the trip to Stockholm and he redirected his speech to the awards ceremony.
