Hemingway Letters Project

The Hemingway Letters Project will result in the publication of a comprehensive scholarly edition of the author’s estimated 6,000-7,000 letters, approximately ninety percent of them never before published. The edition will be published by Cambridge University Press. The project is authorized by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation/Society and the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, holders, respectively, of the U.S. and international rights to the letters. We are particularly grateful to Patrick Hemingway, who originally conceived of a complete scholarly edition of his father’s letters and who has been most generous and supportive of this effort.

The Hemingway Letters Project is supported in part by a Scholarly Editions Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Furthermore, it has been designated a We, the People project, "a special recognition by the NEH for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture."

Hemingway’s outgoing letters will be published in chronological order in twelve volumes, with the final volume to include "Additional Letters" that come to light in the course of the project. Publication of the first volume is projected for late 2008, with subsequent volumes to follow at twelve to fifteen-month intervals. Volume 1 of The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway will contain the more than 400 letters that Hemingway wrote through 1925 (approximately one-third of them concentrated in the year 1925 alone). Taking into account how the letters are distributed over the years and aiming to produce volumes of comparable length while also considering natural divisions in Hemingway’s life and career, we have planned for Volume 2 to span the years 1926-1929; Volume 3, 1930-1933; Volume 4, 1934-1939; and Volume 5, 1940-1944.

The project will progress in close consultation with an Editorial Advisory Committee of distinguished scholars, which serves as a liaison with the Hemingway Foundation/Society. The committee, headed by Linda Patterson Miller, also includes Jackson R. Bryer, Scott Donaldson, James L. W. West III, and Foundation/Society president James Meredith.

A vital component of the project is the involvement of an international group of Consulting Scholars. These individuals will serve in a variety of roles according to their interests and expertise, including as individual volume editors and co-editors. Others will serve as expert consultants on particular places or periods in Hemingway's life, as language consultants (Hemingway sometimes wrote letters or portions of them in Spanish, French, and Italian as well as in English), or as specialists in aspects of textual editing and annotation. To date, a dozen scholars have agreed to serve, and additional scholars are likely to come on board as the project proceeds. In assembling this team, we are striving to engage the talents of both established and emerging scholars, thus helping to ensure a strong foundation and a vigorous future for this long-term editorial project and for Hemingway studies in general.

With support from Penn State University, where the project is centered, we have established a solid infrastructure. Our full-time associate editor and project coordinator, LaVerne Kennevan Maginnis, brings with her more than twenty years of managerial and editing experience, including fourteen years with the Cambridge edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Two graduate research assistants are assigned to the project, and a number of others, including selected honors student interns, part-time project assistants, and an information technology specialist, are at work on the project daily, accessioning, filing, making initial transcriptions of letters as copies that we have ordered and solicited arrive, and maintaining the control file database for the central archive of letters that we are amassing. Prior to publication, transcriptions will be perfected against original source texts during site visits to repositories by volume editors or other designated scholars.

Because Hemingway’s letters are widely dispersed and he did not routinely keep copies, our first task has been to track down and obtain copies of the extant letters. The largest repository, the John F. Kennedy Library’s Hemingway Collection, generously donated copies of its entire holdings of more than 2,500 letters.

We have located letters in more than 75 additional library collections and institutional archives in the United States and abroad, and identified numerous holdings in the hands of dealers, collectors, and private citizens. As a result of our author’s query in major newspapers and periodicals, including the Kansas City Star, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Review of Books, we have received copies to date of more than 150 Hemingway letters from individual collectors, some of whom corresponded with Hemingway themselves. We continue to hear from individuals holding Hemingway letters who are willing to share copies with the project, and we are most grateful for this invaluable assistance.

As we continue in our world-wide search for Hemingway letters, we will be most appreciative of information anyone can offer that would assist our efforts to locate letters in private hands or in other collections that we might otherwise overlook in our search, particularly those outside the U.S. As a non-profit scholarly project, we are not able to purchase original letters. We are seeking only copies of letters, and will gladly reimburse owners for copying and mailing expenses. Already a number of individuals and institutions in several countries have kindly shared photocopies or scans of their letters with the project. Contributors will be gratefully acknowledged in the published volumes or kept confidential, according to their preference.

We deeply appreciate the generosity of those organizations and individuals who have provided financial support for this important scholarly research. In addition to the crucial institutional support provided by Penn State University, we have received gifts and grants from Cingular Wireless, the Heinz Endowments, AT&T Wireless, the Michigan Hemingway Society, Mary Ann Malkin, Harold Hein, Mark Weyermuller, and other individual donors. The Xerox Corporation has contributed a Document Centre with copy, fax, print, and scan capabilities, as well as a DocuShare software system that has been customized in consultation with library personnel and information technology experts for use in accessioning the thousands of copies of letters that will make up the project’s central archive, in enabling far-flung scholars to collaborate on this work, and in managing all phases of the editing process.

Many people already have been most generous with their time, expertise, and financial support, as well as with Hemingway treasures in their possession. We are grateful to all who have been and will be contributing to this exciting and historic effort. Please be in touch with questions, suggestions, and "leads."

Sandra Spanier
Professor of English and General Editor, Hemingway Letters Project
The Pennsylvania State University
112 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802

phone: 814-865-1879
fax: 814-865-6046
email: hemletters@psu.edu

Updated 1-10-07