TLS, one page, 7.75 x 10.5, December 13, 1934. Letter to Italian-American newspaper editor Carlo Tresca concerning the plight of Cubist painter Luis Quintanilla, who was imprisoned in Spain. In part: "I appreciate very greatly your offer to help about Quintanilla. Also I understand why, in any case, you would be doing something about the general situation. It is a terrible one. Dos has written you what we are trying to do ie. impress the government with the man's value as an artist. I think you, as a practical man, see how this impressing should be made as non-political and polite as possible. There is no assurance that it will help him—but it is an excellent chance. You know Spaniards and how they are to deal with…'Turn him loose and we think highly of your never doubted generosity and culture and down with the leyenda negra in which of course we have never believed.' Turn one loose and you start to turn all loose we do not say. But that is how it is: like olives out of the bottle or the cork out of the garafon."
Hemingway adds a lengthy handwritten postscript: "I do not believe it will work but I think it has a better chance right now than anything else except personal influence: by which everything in Spain is always done. What will over-throw the military is having brought in the Moors. But that is too long to wait for. I wish I could have been there to see it so I could write about it." Matted and framed to an overall size of 13 x 16. In very good condition, with overall dampstaining, heaviest at the bottom, affecting appearance but not affecting the letter's readability whatsoever.
Luis Quintanilla was imprisoned in October 1934 for a period of just over eight months, convicted of hosting revolutionary meetings in his studio. Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos led the American protests against his imprisonment, circulating petitions and organizing protests in the United States; the two authors also collaborated on a catalog for an exhibition of Quintanilla's prints at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York, which ran from November 20-December 4, 1934. When Quintanilla was forced into exile in 1939, he moved to New York at Hemingway's suggestion. The brutal Spanish Civil War would serve as the basis for one of Hemingway's most iconic novels, For Whom the Bell Tolls, published in 1940.
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