A Letter Ernest Hemingway Wrote About Surviving Two Plane Crashes Just Sold for More Than $230,000

Ernest Hemingway is best known for his novels, nonfiction, and short stories. But a simple letter by the author is also capable of fetching the big bucks.

A missive that Hemingway sent after finding himself the victim of not one, but two plane crashes recently hammered down for $237,055, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday. Sold by Nate D. Sanders Auctions, the four-page letter was written by the novelist to his lawyer in 1954 while he was recovering from the traumatic incidents.

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“I am weak from so much internal bleeding,” Hemingway wrote. His right arm was “burned to the bone 3rd degree and it would cramp up on me … Mary [his wife] had a big shock and her memory not too hot yet and it will take quite a time to sort things out.”

The accidents that led to Hemingway’s injuries have been well documented by his biographers. In January 1954, the author and his wife at the time, Mary Welsh, went on safari in East Africa, the Post explained. Hemingway had hired a Cessna to fly the couple around, and while in the air near the Murchison Falls in Uganda, the plane dove to avoid some birds, hitting a telegraph wire in the process. The resulting crash left Hemingway, Welsh, and their pilot stranded on the shore of the Nile.

Despite Hemingway’s sprained shoulder and Welsh’s broken ribs, they flagged down a boat the next morning and were taken to a nearby town. Once there, they got on another plane to leave Uganda—but that plane also crashed, bursting into flames. While many passengers were able to escape the wreckage, Hemingway had to butt open a door with his head, and he left the scene with two fractured disks, a fractured skull, and burns over his head, face, and arms.

The unbelievable circumstances would have been right at home in one of Hemingway’s books. Yet, of course, it was all too real for the author. Despite the harrowing tale, though, the letter recently auctioned off saw Hemingway in relatively good spirits, as he discussed personal business like payments that needed to be made to various creditors.

“I am more valuable to them alive than dead,” he wrote. “And at present am trying [to] stay alive.”

Somehow, that he did.

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