A true story that reads like fiction, our project is based on hundreds of letters to our family from Ernest Hemingway’s best friend, Major General Charles T. “Buck” Lanham. The general and his wife Mary “Pete” Lanham were Greer’s father’s godparents, and their ties to the Greer and Rising families go back to the 1910’s. Hemingway and Lanham met on a World War II battlefield in 1944 and remained confidants until Hemingway’s death in 1961. Hemingway modeled his protagonist Colonel Richard Cantwell in the novel Across the River and Into the Trees after Lanham, and there are other important links between the two men that influenced Hemingway’s art. Lanham wanted his letters to our family destroyed, but they were not. To study the friendship, we pair the private letters with existing Hemingway scholarship discussing Lanham. So far the themes include love, war, risk, mental illness, poetry, bravery, honor, treason, and how all of these fold into a brotherly love. We are seeking representation for the book.