The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced that the Hemingway Letters Project will receive an award of $282,520 plus $150,000 in federal matching funds to support ongoing work on The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, the comprehensive scholarly edition of the writer’s outgoing correspondence. This award is the seventh three-year Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant the Letters Project has received since 2005.
The latest NEH grant will support work on The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Volume 7 (1936-1940) and work on Volumes 8-9 and later volumes. During this period of 1936-1943, Hemingway covers the Spanish Civil War for the North American Newspaper Alliance, sees the dissolution of his marriage to Pauline, begins his relationship with journalist Martha Gellhorn, who becomes his third wife, takes up permanent residence in Cuba, publishes For Whom the Bell Tolls, dusts off his war correspondent’s credentials again to accompany Gellhorn to Southeast Asia and China to report on the Sino-Japanese War, and runs clandestine missions hunting German U-boats in the Caribbean.
“It is an honor to have been selected by NEH to receive this recognition, and we are grateful to the Hemingway Society and its members for their enthusiastic interest in this ongoing project," said Sandra Spanier, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State and General Editor of The Hemingway Letters Project.
Headquartered at the Pennsylvania State University, the project is authorized by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society and by the Hemingway Foreign Rights Trust, holders, respectively, of the U.S. and international rights to the letters. The Hemingway Letters Project is producing a comprehensive scholarly edition of more than 6,500 surviving letters by Hemingway, about eighty-five percent of which are previously unpublished. The edition is being published by Cambridge University Press in a projected 17 volumes, in both print and electronic form.
The most recent volume of the edition, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Volume 6 (1934-1936), edited by Sandra Spanier, Verna Kale, and Miriam B. Mandel, was published in May 2024.