UNDER KILIMANJARO has an unusual publishing history that relates integrally both to the establishment of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and the Hemingway Papers housed at the John E Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. Hemingway's widow and executrix Mary Hemingway established the Ernest Hemingway Foundation in 1965 "for the purposes of awakening, sustaining an interest in, promoting, fostering, stimulating, improving and developing literature and all forms of literary composition and expression." She had also decided, by the following decade, to donate Hemingway materials to the JFK Library, which she designated in 1978 as the official repository for the Hemingway Papers. In 1980 a group of Hemingway scholars gathered at Thompson Island in Boston Harbor, offshore from the JFK Library, to assess the significance of this gift. From that gathering came the establishment of the Hemingway Society, committed to supporting and fostering Hemingway scholarship. Recognizing the compatibility of the Society's and the Foundation's goals in emphasizing "the promotion, assistance and coordination of scholarship and studies relating to the works and life of the late Ernest Hemingway," Hemingway's sons Patrick and John invited the Society to assume the duties, resources, and functions of the Foundation upon the death of Mary Hemingway in 1986.

An important aspect of these responsibilities involves managing stipulated Hemingway copyrights in the United States as related to previously unpublished letters and manuscripts. That charge included the manuscript that Hemingway started in late 1954 following his and Mary's African safari that began in September 1953, and ended abruptly with two back-to-back plane crashes on 23 and 24 January 1954. Hemingway worked steadily throughout 1955 on the manuscript that he had begun to refer to as his "African book." He had nearly completed it when he became diverted, in early 1956, by the filming of The Old Man and the...