The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 5, 1932-1934: 1932-1934

Description

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 5, spanning 1932 through May 1934, traces the completion and publication of Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. During this intensely active period, Hemingway hunts in Arkansas and Wyoming, fishes the waters off Key West and Cuba, revisits Madrid and Paris, and undertakes a long-anticipated African safari. He witnesses transitions at home and abroad: the deepening Great Depression, Prohibition-era rumrunning, revolution in Cuba, and political unrest in Spain. His readership and celebrity continue to expand as he begins writing for the new men's magazine Esquire. As the volume ends, Hemingway has just acquired his beloved boat, Pilar. The letters detail these events as well as his relationships with his family, friends, publishers, critics and literary contemporaries including editor Maxwell Perkins, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Together the letters paint an intimate self-portrait of this multi-faceted, self-confident, energetic artist in his prime.

Sandra Spanier, Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway and co-editor of the first four volumes. Her essays have appeared in Modern Critical Interpretations: 'A Farewell to Arms' (1987), New Essays on 'A Farewell to Arms' (Cambridge, 1990), Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (2002), and Ernest Hemingway in Context (Cambridge, 2013), and she serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review. Her books include Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters (2015), Process: A Novel by Kay Boyle (2001) and Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles's rediscovered play, Love Goes to Press (1995; revised edition 2010). Miriam B. Mandel, Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and American Culture at Tel Aviv University, served as Associate Editor of earlier volumes and co-editor of the fourth volume of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway. Her books include Reading Hemingway: The Facts in the Fictions (1995, re-issued 2011), Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon': The Complete Annotations (2008), and Hemingway's 'The Dangerous Summer': The Complete Annotations (2008). She is the editor of A Companion to Hemingway's 'Death in the Afternoon' (2004) and Hemingway and Africa (2011, re-issued 2016), has published more than thirty essays in academic journals and books, is the recipient of seven major grants, and serves on the editorial board of The Hemingway Review.

'Cambridge and the editors have produced a 'damned good', magisterial work on one of the most complicated and skilful writers in English, and scholars and book lovers will eagerly await the twelve or more volumes to come.' Austin Long, The Review of English Studies