The papers at the Morgan show a Hemingway who is not always sure of himself. There are running lists of stories he kept fiddling with, including one with his own evaluations: “Tour de force,” “Pretty good,” “Maybe good.” And there are lists and lists of possible titles, including the 45 he considered for “Farewell” (among the discards, thank goodness, were “Sorrow for Pleasure,” “The Carnal Education” and “Every Night and All”).

Hemingway also tried 47 different endings for that novel. Those on view at the Morgan include the so-called “Nada” ending (“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and that is all I can promise you”) and the only slightly more hopeful one suggested by Fitzgerald, in which the world “kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

In display case after display case, you see Hemingway during his Paris years inventing and reinventing himself, discovering as he goes along just what kind of writer he wants to be. In a moving 1925 letter to his parents, who refused to read “In Our Time,” his second story collection, he writes: “You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not just to depict life — or criticize it — but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You cant do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.” As the years go by, he also puts on weight, grows a mustache (seen in a Man Ray photograph) and for some unfathomable reason poses for an oil painting as “Kid Balzac,” a challenger ready to knock out the great 19th-century realist.

Image Hemingway, left, in Pamplona, Spain, in 1925. Credit... The Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

By the time the Second World War broke out, Hemingway had solidified — fossilized even — into the iconic figure we now remember: Papa. Even J. D. Salinger calls him this, in a 1946 letter written while Salinger is in an Army psychiatric hospital, in which he says of the war that a 1944 meeting with Hemingway in Paris was “the only helpful minutes of the whole business.” Hemingway, often drinking and despondent, didn’t know it, but his best work was behind him by then, though there is perhaps an inkling of diminished expectation in a July 1949 letter he wrote to the screenwriter and novelist Peter Viertel that ends: “I don’t know any place left in the states where it’s the kind of wild I like.”

Image A letter from J. D. Salinger. Credit... Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times