The collection consists of the working papers and biographical files about Ernest Hemingway compiled by Baker, Princeton English professor, in preparation of his biography Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). The working papers contain Xeroxes and typed copies of correspondence between Hemingway and friends, publishers, and family, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. T. Lanham, Maxwell Perkins, and Mary, Patrick, and Hadley Hemingway. There are drafts, a final typed version, and proofs for the biography, as well as a mock-up copy of the book. In addition, there are transcripts of articles written by Hemingway for the Toronto Star and Esquire, periodical articles by and about him, letters to Baker about Hemingway, copies of reviewers' comments, magazine interviews, material relating to Hemingway's winning of the Nobel Prize in literature (1954) and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1953), a Xerox copy of the original manuscript of Hemingway's Islands in the Stream (1970), and a scrapbook.

The biographical files begin in the 1800s with material on the Hemingway family genealogy and span Hemingway's entire life, from his birth in 1899 to his suicide in 1961. The files include letters to Baker, copies of anecdotes, correspondence between other people about Hemingway, eyewitness accounts of Hemingway in World War II, excerpts from Mary Hemingway's diaries while in Africa, documents, memorabilia, such as Hemingway's 1917 yearbook from Oak Park High School (Illinois), and printed matter.

The collection also contains two of Baker's works unrelated to the Hemingway material: a typed manuscript with the author's corrections of a novel, The Land of Rumblelow (1963), and a typed manuscript with editor's notations of a book of poems, A Year and a Day: Poems (1963), as well as a small file of correspondence of Baker relating to his participation on the Pulitzer Prize Fiction Jury in 1975. In addition, there is a phonograph record (in Russian) with a typed transcript in English of Radio Liberation programs about Boris Pasternak, Dr. Zhivago, and the award of the Nobel Prize to him in 1958.