Hemingway Letters Project produces new volume of iconic writer’s correspondence

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Now more than two decades into its existence, the Penn State-based Hemingway Letters Project continues to offer the many shades of American literary master Ernest Hemingway’s personality via his personal correspondence.

Led by Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Women’s Studies Sandra Spanier and Associate Research Professor of English Verna Kale, the project recently published the sixth volume of “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway” through Cambridge University Press. This volume covers the period from June 1934 to June 1936, plus an appendix of 48 previously unpublished letters written between 1918 and 1934.

Ultimately, the project will produce 17 volumes of Hemingway’s more than 6,000 letters dating from 1907 until his death in 1961.

The book is currently the No. 1 bestseller in Amazon’s American Literature category. And it’s attracted positive reviews from Kirkus Reviews and filmmaker Lynn Novick, who along with famed documentarian Ken Burns co-directed and produced the three-part PBS documentary “Hemingway,” for which Spanier and Kale served as advisers.

“This latest installment of the monumental Hemingway Letters Project is pure gold,” Novick said. “This volume is a fascinating window into a pivotal time in his life, which we all but live alongside him as it unfolds. His fierce passion for fishing, the brewing war in Spain, his complicated relationships with other writers and friends – it all comes vividly alive in his own inimitable words.”

Spanier and Kale have also promoted the letters on several podcasts, including the Hemingway-themed “One True Podcast” and the one produced by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, home to the world’s largest collection of Hemingway’s personal papers. Penn State University Libraries itself is home to two prominent collections of Hemingway papers — the Toby and Betty Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway and a collection donated in 2008 by Hemingway’s nephew, Ernest Hemingway Mainland.

Meanwhile, the Hemingway Letters Project recently received the Association for Documentary Editing’s 2024 Lyman H. Butterfield Award for its “exceptional contributions to the field of documentary editing.”

“Through their exemplary dedication, the project has demonstrated sustained service to the craft, and shown dedication to highlighting and delivering outstanding research through their multi-volume publication, ‘The Letters of Ernest Hemingway,’” said award committee chair Victoria Sciancalepore in a statement.

A third of the way completed, the project, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, remains “very much a team effort,” said Spanier, who along with Kale edited the sixth volume with Miriam B. Mandel, a fellow Hemingway scholar based in Israel.

“And we have a wonderful team at Penn State, from our two staff members, Jeanne Alexander and Dave Eggert, to our graduate research assistants and undergrad interns,” said Spanier, the project’s general editor. “The letters have developed a very real audience; it’s amazing how carefully people read them. We get letters and emails from around the world. And our audience is in no way just academics. We have to meet the scholarly standard, but we have to — and want to — make it engaging for readers. After all, our subject is certainly engaging, so it would be incongruous of us to have stuffy, dry footnotes for such exciting material.”

“Volume 6” covers a fruitful creative period for Hemingway during which he completed and published his experimental creative non-fiction book, “Green Hills of Africa,” as well as the short stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” He also wrote numerous essays on range of topics for Esquire magazine.

The letters find him mentoring aspiring writers, grousing about his critics, corresponding with old friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald, and expounding on his exploits as a record-breaking fisherman in his beloved Cuba and Key West.

The correspondence also showcases Hemingway’s sense of humor — and his tender side, particularly when he’s consoling a family after their young son dies of spinal meningitis.

“It’s a very busy time for him artistically. He’s able to get a lot done; he’s feeling very creative. And he’s fishing a lot,” Spanier said. “What’s also somewhat surprising is how generous he is to other writers. He’s spending a lot of time and effort encouraging and promoting other artists, which is not typically the image of him. And he’s very politically astute. He’s interested in Cuban politics, and observing things happening in Spain that will develop into the Spanish Civil War. He’s writing about Mussolini, saying, ‘We’ve got to put a stop to fascism right now.’ ... But what shines through above all is how dedicated and serious he is about his writing. It was a real vocation for him. He’s just not going to write what the public wants — he was going to continually push the boundaries and try to get to the ‘fourth dimension of writing,’ as he called it.”

Kale echoed this perspective. 

“He wanted to write books that would last,” Kale added. “He also had no problem aggravating the critics. He was determined to write what he wanted to write without being controlled by other people.”

The Hemingway Letters Project began in 2002, after Spanier was approached about putting together a scholarly edition of Hemingway’s letters.

From there, Spanier, who as a graduate student at Penn State studied under renowned Hemingway expert Philip Young, approached then-College of the Liberal Arts Dean Susan Welch, who loved the idea.

“I was honored to be asked to take this on, and Penn State has been a wonderful institutional home for this project,” said Spanier, noting Patrick Hemingway, Ernest’s last surviving son, “has been supportive and helpful to the project, answering questions and sharing anecdotes that only he can tell.”

Kale developed her love for Hemingway while reading “The Sun Also Rises” as a recent college graduate traveling through Spain, and she specifically applied to graduate school at Penn State after learning about the Hemingway Letters Project. After initially serving as a research assistant on the project, she eventually became its associate editor upon returning to the University as a faculty member. She’s also the author of the biography “Ernest Hemingway,” part of the Critical Lives series, published by Reaktion/University of Chicago Press in 2016.

“I don’t get bored of Hemingway in the way that I might another writer. Which is great, because we have so many more letters to publish,” Kale said with a laugh.

Through the years, more than 30 graduate students have worked on the project, as well as dozens of undergraduate interns. Many of them go on to become academics and librarians, according to Spanier and Kale.

“What’s great for the students is that they get to do the initial research on these annotations, but they’re also receiving hands-on training in archival research using periodicals and microfilm, understanding what makes a source trustworthy and reputable,” Kale said. “And because Hemingway lived such an interesting life, the annotations involved allow them to have a lot of fun with the research. They enjoy the puzzle and challenge of finding these references. I can think offhand of two students who published scholarly papers on some of the little details they found in these letters.”

Spanier, Kale and the rest of the project’s team have already begun work on the seventh volume of letters, which will cover July 1936 through the early part of 1940. It will include Heminway’s firsthand observations on the Spanish Civil War, which served as the inspiration for his novel, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” The period also captures his move to Cuba in 1939, and the dissolution of his second marriage as he begins a relationship with renowned journalist and fiction writer Martha Gellhorn, who became his third wife.

As always, Hemingway aficionados can expect another illuminating peak into the world of this endlessly fascinating man, according to Spanier and Kale.

“The letters capture so many different facets of him,” Spanier said. “He might write several letters on the same day to five different people, and it’s always interesting to see how he might relay the same events on a particular day – a particular fish he caught, or whatever. He always tailors his letters to the specific recipient. It really fills out the portrait of who he was.”