The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 3, 1926-1929

by Ernest Hemingway, Rena Sanderson (Editor), Sandra Spanier (Editor), Robert W. Trogdon (Editor)

Overview

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926–1929, featuring many previously unpublished letters, follows a rising star as he emerges from the literary Left Bank of Paris and moves into the American mainstream. Maxwell Perkins, legendary editor at Scribner's, nurtured the young Hemingway's talent, accepting his satirical novel Torrents of Spring (1926) in order to publish what would become a signature work of the twentieth century: The Sun Also Rises (1926). By early 1929 Hemingway had completed A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's letters of this period also reflect landmark events in his personal life, including the dissolution of his first marriage, his remarriage, the birth of his second son, and the suicide of his father. As the volume ends in April 1929, Hemingway is setting off from Key West to return to Paris and standing on the cusp of celebrity as one of the major writers of his time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521897358
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/14/2015
Series:	The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway , #3
Pages:	731
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Rena Sanderson is Associate Professor Emerita of English at Boise State University. She served on the board of the Hemingway Society and Foundation and directed two Hemingway Conferences. Her works on Hemingway include Blowing the Bridge: Essays on Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1992), Hemingway's Italy: New Perspectives (2006), and essays in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway (1996) and in Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (2002).

Sandra Spanier, Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway and is co-editor of its first two volumes. Some of her publications include Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters (2015) and Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles' rediscovered play Love Goes to Press (1995; revised edition, 2010). Her most recent essay on Hemingway appeared in Ernest Hemingway in Context (2013), and she serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review.

Robert W. Trogdon is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Kent State University. He is co-editor for Volumes 1 and 2 of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. He is author of The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners and the Business of Literature (2007) and editor of Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference (2002). He has served as a member of the board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society.

Date of Birth:

July 21, 1899

Date of Death:

July 2, 1961

Place of Birth:

Oak Park, Illinois

Place of Death:

Ketchum, Idaho

Table of Contents

General editor's preface Sandra Spanier; Acknowledgments; Note on the text; Abbreviations and short titles; Introduction to the volume Rena Sanderson; Chronology; Maps; The letters, 1926–1929; Roster of correspondents; Calendar of letters; Index of recipients; General index.

Editorial Reviews

"Reading Hemingway's letters is to go back in time by stepping into the fascinating world of a revolutionary wordsmith; a voyage through decades to the very moments when literature was taking a sudden bend in the road; a shift that was being steered by the father of modern literature. Indeed, the value of these letters cannot be overstated."
Nick Mafi, Esquire

"Scholars will be deeply absorbed; general readers will find enjoyment and enlightenment."
Steve Paul, Booklist

"Away from the chisel work of his early fiction … the letters show Hemingway at play in figurative language, humour, meandering sentences and desultory subjects."
Naomi Wood, Literary Review

‘What's most enjoyable is how lacking in self-consciousness Papa could be; he didn't yet realise people would be keeping his bits of paper. Or he simply didn't care, so one sees the brilliance and offensiveness all at once.' The Tablet

'…meticulously edited.' Nicolaus Mills, The Daily Beast

'Volume Three’s letters are an invaluable record of Hemingway as a professional author. There is less on his aesthetic than in earlier correspondence - Hemingway is more confident now in his art. But his writing methods are covered in detail.' James McNamara, Australian Book Review

'… an astonishing scholarly achievement.' Phillip Lopate, The Times Literary Supplement

'Scholars of Hemingway will no doubt value the completeness of the work. This volume is painstakingly yet unobtrusively annotated.' Byron Landry, The Hopkins Review

'The quality of the ancillary details on each page is (in my experience) unmatched by other letters- compilations of famous writers - a testament to the passion, skill, and dedication of the editorial team. The collection is a great achievement and a superb resource for scholars of Hemingway’s work and American literatures more generally.' The Hemingway Review

From the Publisher

2015-06-30
The third volume of a projected 17-volume collection of Hemingway's letters covers three years during which the author rose to literary fame with the publication of The Sun Also Rises (1926), Torrents of Spring (1926), and the collection Men Without Women (1927). By 1929, he had completed the manuscript for A Farewell to Arms. The period was marked, too, by emotional upheaval: his father committed suicide, leaving his mother and teenage siblings in financial straits; he ended his first marriage to Hadley Richardson and married Pauline Pfeiffer. Among 344 letters (70 percent of which were previously unpublished) to 92 recipients, only two are to Hadley and 9 to Pauline. Hadley burned her husband's letters after their divorce, and those to Pauline were destroyed, according to her instructions, after her death. Editor Maxwell Perkins is a frequent recipient; others include family members; friends such as Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald; and fellow writers, including Sherwood Anderson and T.S. Eliot. In a detailed introduction, the volume's editors note that Hemingway's letters "are unpolished, unselfconscious, candid and casual"—and, they might have added, often catty and gossipy. Money is a recurring theme. Hemingway disparages Robert McAlmon ("without money, he would never have been published anywhere by anybody"); Ford Maddox Ford ("kissing asses of people with money" to fund his magazine); and sometimes himself. "Am thinking of quitting publishing any stuff for the next 10 or 15 years as soon as I get my debts paid up," he wrote to Fitzgerald. "To hell with the whole goddam business." The most moving letter is to Hadley, written in November 1926. Acknowledging his cruelty to her because of his affair with Pauline, he implores her not to feel rushed into deciding to divorce. But Hadley stood firm: "Haven't I yet made it quite plain that I want to start proceedings for a divorce from you—right away?" she responded immediately. A meticulously edited volume offering an unvarnished portrait.

Kirkus Reviews