Photos courtesy Steve Soboroff

When collector Steve Soboroff bought Ernest Hemingway's 1932 Royal Model T typewriter, he knew he was getting his hands on a piece of history. This was the author who coined the phrase "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed," after all. But it wasn't until Soboroff got the machine home and started cleaning it up to place with the others in his collection — which include John Lennon's, Jack London's, and the Unabomber's, among many others — that he realized there was more to his prize.

Underneath the body of the typewriter he found several old envelopes, addressed to Hemingway, and some notes. But most interesting were some cracked, crumbling negatives, fossils of photos long since forgotten. After having the images restored to some degree, he sent scans of them along to Sandra Spanier, Hemingway scholar and author of two volumes of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, who marveled at what he had found, identifying the people and place captured:

"How interesting! Those photos look to me as though they were taken at Windemere, the Hemingways' cottage on Walloon Lake, Michigan, when Ernest was a small child."

Soboroff says Spanier went on to name the two children on the steps as Hemingway and his sister, and the man in the boat as Dr. Clarence Hemingway, Ernest's father. Seated behind him may be either Ernest himself or his older sister Marcelline. The double-exposed image shows two women, one of whom is likely his mother, musician Grace Hall-Hemingway, in the bow of a boat, from two perspectives.

Soboroff sent Esquire the negatives, and we re-scanned them for as much clarity and definition as we could, the results of which you see here. While we don't know exactly what the circumstances around the images are, or why Hemingway chose to store them underneath a typewriter he would eventually give away as a gift while on a fishing trip in Cuba, it should be noted he always professed to hate his mother. No matter, it's amazing to have a glimpse, however brief, into the intimate early existence of a man who would go on to become both an Esquire contributor and the stuff of legend.

PLUS: Click here to learn how to make a daquiri like Hemingway on Esquire TV

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