Ernest Hemingway – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

What would you do if you saw your obituary?

Francis H.C. Crick’s Nobel Prize Medal and Nobel Diploma, awarded in 1962 for his work related to DNA molecules, sold for $2.27 million at an April 2013 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 1888, a French newspaper published Alfred Nobel’s obituary with the following title: “Le marchand de la mort est mort” or “The merchant of death is dead.”

In reality, it was actually his brother Ludvig who had died, but Alfred was appalled that this kind of sendoff could tarnish his own professional legacy. One presumes that the only error was the mix-up in names since the sobriquet seemed apt given Alfred’s contributions to the effectiveness of substances that resulted in death.

In a complicated maneuver, the inventor of dynamite attempted to rectify future obits by posthumously donating the majority of his estate (94 percent) to the establishment of the Nobel Prizes, designed to expunge his reputation for all the deaths resulting from his explosive product. It was only partially successful since he was accused of treason against France for selling Ballistite (a smokeless propellant composed of two explosives) to Italy. The French forced him to leave Paris and he moved to Sanremo, Italy, where he died in 1896. There were five Nobel categories with an emphasis on “peace” … for obvious reasons.

A native of Stockholm, Nobel made a fortune when he invented dynamite in 1867 as a more reliable alternative to nitroglycerin. As a chemist and engineer, he basically revolutionized the field of explosives. Some accounts give him credit for 355 inventions. In 1895, a year before his death, he signed the final version of his will, which established the organization that would bear his name and “present prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind.”

Nobel’s family contested the will and the first prizes were not handed out until 1901. Among the first winners were German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, and German microbiologist Emil Adolf von Behring, who developed a treatment for diphtheria. The Nobel Prizes were soon recognized as the most prestigious in the world. Except for war-related interruptions, prizes have been awarded virtually every year. The category of economics was added in 1969.

The first American to receive a Nobel was President Theodore Roosevelt, who garnered the prize in 1906 after he helped mediate an end to the Russian-Japanese war. The German-born American scientist Albert Michelson claimed the physics prize the next year. However, the peace and literature prizes would become the most familiar to Americans and are some of the most controversial. Critics voiced concerns over Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson (1919), George Marshall (1953) and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (1973). More recently, winners have included Al Gore (2007) for making an Oscar-winning documentary on climate change, and Barack Obama (2009) “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” (for more, see Obama’s Wars by Bob Woodward).

William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison generally have escaped criticism, as have multiple winners like Marie Curie (the first woman in 1911, and in two separate categories), and Linus Pauling, among others. The Red Cross has snagged three. From a personal standpoint, the most obvious non-winner is Mahatma Gandhi, or as someone quipped, “Gandhi can do without a Nobel Prize, but can the Nobel Committee do without Gandhi?”

I think not.

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Here’s why Foote, Faulkner are among our greatest writers

A 1929 first edition of William Faulkner’s *The Sound and the Fury*, in its original first state dust jacket, sold for $15,000 at a March 2018 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Whenever the topic of “favorite author” is inevitably raised, I quickly steer the conversation to two categories. First is non-fiction, since it gives me an opportunity to nominate Shelby Foote for my all-time favorite subject of the Civil War. Secondly, I suggest that fiction favorites be limited to only writers born in the great state of Mississippi.

Shelby Dade Foote Jr. (1916-2005) spent over 20 years working on his masterpiece The Civil War: A Narrative, a three-volume, 3,000-page work that captivated me. However, like many others, it wasn’t until filmmaker Ken Burns aired his PBS documentary in 1990 that I became aware of just how much I truly appreciated it. In the first hour of the 12-hour series, Foote appeared in 90 segments. His sagacious comments and distinctive Southern drawl added a remarkable degree of authenticity to an otherwise only great production.

Legend has it that paperback sales of Foote’s book jumped to 1,000 per day and ended up selling over 400,000 mores copies – all as a result of his newfound celebrity. He reportedly remarked to Burns: “You have made me a millionaire.” A few critics complained that Foote had a Southern bias and cited a passage where he stated that Abraham Lincoln and Confederate Army general Nathan Bedford Forrest were the two smartest men in the entire war and tried to point out a few weaknesses of Forrest when they really objected to simply pairing him with the revered Lincoln.

As for fiction writers born in Mississippi, there are a lot more to choose from than you might expect. Consider Eudora Welty (The Optimist’s Daughter), Willie Morris (North Toward Home) and William Faulkner (As I Lay Dying), to name a few.

Of these, William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) didn’t give a damn about self-promotion. In fact, you could spell his name with or without the u. “Either way suits me,” he said quite often. As a boy, his parents took him to meet the great Confederate general (and Robert E. Lee’s right arm) James Longstreet (1821-1904). Little William had the temerity to ask, “What was the matter with you at Gettysburg? You should have won!” By reputation, Faulkner had a prickly side his whole life, but it didn’t seem to affect the quality of his writing.

When asked about grants for writers, Faulkner replied, “I’ve never known anything good in writing to come from having accepted any free gift of money. The good writers never apply to a foundation. They’re too busy writing something.” Faulkner would have been unaware that Foote (himself born in Greenville, Miss.) accepted Guggenheim Fellowships (1955-57) and Ford Foundation grants to get him through the 20 years of writing his Civil War narrative. However, as much as Faulkner’s work was admired by other writers, by 1945, all of his books, except for two, were out of print.

Yet just four years later, the unusually myopic Nobel Prize Committee made an unusually clear-sighted decision. In 1949, they awarded Faulkner the Nobel Prize for Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel winner. Two of his other works, A Fable (1954), and his last novel The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer for Fiction. Only two others have won the Pulitzer twice: Booth Tarkington 1919/1922 and John Updike 1982/1991.

Ernest Hemingway actually won in both 1941 and 1953, but the president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler, found Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls too offensive and convinced the committee to revere their decision and no prize was awarded in 1941. However, the movie version was nominated for nine Academy Awards and is a good piece of film.

In June 1943, Faulkner found an unopened letter that had been there for three months, since he didn’t recognize the return address. It was a proposal from writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley to publish a “Portable Faulkner” to keep him from falling into literary obscurity. Faulkner was working as a Hollywood screenwriter (The Big Sleep) and was in danger of seeing all his books out of print. It was this effort that resuscitated Faulkner’s career and led directly to the 1949 Nobel Prize. Novelist and literary critic Robert Penn Warren called it the “great watershed moment,” for it saved Faulkner’s reputation and career.

True to style, when Cowley asked Faulkner to get Hemingway to write a preface, he refused. “It would be like asking one racehorse in the middle of the race to broadcast a blurb on another horse running in the same race.” He remained a prickly man to the end and I suspect it and all his wonderful writing came out of the same Southern Bourbon bottle.

Gilded Age Created Super-Wealthy Americans and their Extremely Large Homes

Cornelius Vanderbilt at one point controlled 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

By Jim O’Neal

A recent New York Times edition has a follow-up story on America’s most expensive house – a 38,000-square-foot beauty listed at $250 million. The current all-time record is believed to be an East Hampton estate that sold for $147 million in 2014, followed by a California house that sold for $117.5 million in 2013. Apparently, there is another Bel Air project under construction that would dwarf all of these at $500 million.

This may seem like a modern-day phenomenon, but it hardly compares with the late 19th century – “The Gilded Age” – when truly vast fortunes were accumulated to the point it required “creative spending,” and real estate was a favored target. The Vanderbilts were a prime example, as shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt stood out among other famous names of the day, such as Morgan, Astor, Rockefeller, Mellon and Carnegie. At one point, “Commodore” Vanderbilt (as he liked to be called) personally controlled 10 percent of all the money in circulation in the United States.

Naturally, all these wealthy Americans built homes on a grand scale. Grandest of all were the Vanderbilts. They built 10 mansions in New York alone, all on 5th Avenue, one with 137 rooms. And everyone built more palatial homes outside the city, particularly in Newport, R.I. The super-rich even had the nonchalance to call them “cottages,” despite the fact that they were so big even the servants needed to have servants.

This gaudy ostentation generated such widespread disapproval that a Senate committee seriously considered introducing legislation to limit how much a person could spend on a house (but not how many). These were the days when John D. Rockefeller made $1 billion a year (adjusted for inflation) and paid no income tax. No one did. Congress tried to introduce a 2 percent income tax over $4,000 in 1894 and the Supreme Court promptly ruled it unconstitutional.

Warren Buffet thinks we are better off today since rich folks back then couldn’t buy televisions, luxury cars (with GPS), cellphones, jet travel, microwaves, talking movies, air conditioners, Starbucks lattes … or lifesaving CT scans, organ transplants or statins/vaccines – since they didn’t exist. All they had was money.

So like the Commodore’s grandson George Washington Vanderbilt, they turned to real estate and homes. This Vanderbilt heir decided to build a cottage of his own in 1888, when he was still in his 20s. He bought 130,000 acres in North Carolina and built a rambling 250-room mansion. He hired 1,000 workers to build a dining room with a 75-foot ceiling that seated 76. The estate had 200 miles of road and included a town complete with schools, a hospital, churches, banks, a railroad station and shops for 2,000 employees and their families. The surrounding forests were logged for timber and the many farms produced fruit, vegetables, eggs, poultry and livestock.

He had planned to live there part-time with his mother, but she died before it was complete. So he lived there alone until he finally married and had a daughter. Then he died.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald supposedly once said to Ernest Hemingway: “The rich are different from you and me.” To which Hemingway replied, “Yes, they have more money.” (And thus a famous quote/counter-quote myth was born … with many variations.)

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is president and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].