The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2, 1923–1925 (The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Series Number 2) - Hardcover

Hemingway, Ernest

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521897343 ISBN 13: 9780521897341

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2013

Synopsis

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway documents the life and creative development of a gifted artist and outsized personality whose work would both reflect and transform his times. Volume 2 (1923–1925) illuminates Hemingway's literary apprenticeship in the legendary milieu of expatriate Paris in the 1920s. We witness the development of his friendships with the likes of Sylvia Beach, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. Striving to 'make it new,' he emerges from the tutelage of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein to forge a new style, gaining recognition as one of the most formidable talents of his generation. In this period, Hemingway publishes his first three books, including In Our Time (1925), and discovers a lifelong passion for Spain and the bullfight, quickly transforming his experiences into fiction as The Sun Also Rises (1926). The volume features many previously unpublished letters and a humorous sketch that was rejected by Vanity Fair.

About this title

About the Authors

Sandra Spanier, Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University, is General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway and co-editor of its first volume. Some of her publications include Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986) 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 (2012), and she serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review.

Albert J. DeFazio III, Term Professor at George Mason University, is author of Literary Masterpieces: The Sun Also Rises (2000), editor of Dear Papa … Dear Hotch: The Ernest Hemingway/A. E. Hotchner Correspondence (2005), and Associate Editor of Volume 1 of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. He has contributed bibliographies in The Hemingway Review, served on its editorial board, and edits The Hemingway Newsletter.

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

Reviews

With more than 6,000 letters accounted for so far, the project to publish Ernest Hemingway’s correspondence may yet reveal the fullest picture of the twentieth-century icon that we’ve ever had. The second volume includes merely 242 letters, a majority published for the first time. But they span the crucial early Paris years, and readers can watch Hemingway invent the foundation of his legacy in bullrings, bars, and his writing solitude. This is the Hemingway itching to get beyond the limits of journalism and to earn the respect of his literary elders. By the end, Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time, has been published in the U.S. to admiring reviews. He’s polishing his first great novel, The Sun Also Rises, and knocking out his nearly forgotten satire (and takedown of Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein), The Torrents of Spring. Some letters prefigure the cruelties he inflicted in his Paris memoir, A Moveable Feast. It’s instructive to witness Hemingway’s writing voice change with the moment, and it’s cringe-making to watch him sling ethnic and racial slurs, especially to Ezra Pound. --Steve Paul

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521897343
• ISBN 13: 9780521897341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 604
• Editor: Spanier Sandra, DeFazio III Albert J., Trogdon Robert W.