Ernest Hemingway: Letters, 1908--1925

This volume constitutes the most comprehensive collection of Hemingway's early correspondence to date, and testifies to the significance of the letters as both a scholarly resource and a biographical portrait. On a factual level, the letters provide insight into vital biographical information such as where Hemingway was (or headed) and what he was doing there (so important in light of his peripatetic lifestyle); what personages were with him; what fiction he was composing at the time and, perhaps of greater interest, how the work was proceeding: what Hemingway's preoccupations were and what obstacles stood before him during the writing process.;For a man who consciously fashioned a public persona and cultivated its surrounding myth throughout his life, the letters frequently provide insight into Hemingway's personality and relationships away from the limelight. It does not appear that Hemingway normally rewrote his letters or corrected spelling and other mistakes, and he took great liberties with form. Moreover, as Carlos Baker has also pointed out, Hemingway often employed a personal language that was a combination of personal slang and an almost conscious aversion to pretentious verbiage. We also find Hemingway gossiping freely and offering pointed insights into major figures and works in the literary and artistic arenas. We find new relationships built and old bridges burned. The letters cannot always be trusted, of course; often we find him cultivating and elaborating stories about himself as he did all of his life. But those instances of fictional self-staging contribute equally to our understanding.;All told, the letters help to reveal the complexity and genius of a man and a writer often judged solely on the basis of his public persona. Carlos Baker chose 1917 for the starting point of his collection because he felt it was from that time that Hemingway began to emerge as the figure we now recognize. Yet Baker's collection offers comparatively few letters from the period 1917–1925, and the Bruccoli edition deals exclusively with the period 1925–1947. By extending the focus back to the earliest extant letter, Ernest Hemingway: Letters, 1908–1925 complements the existing collections by offering a more extensive portrait of the author as a young man and aspiring artist. Ultimately, the collection contributes invaluable information toward a more comprehensive appreciation of Ernest Hemingway as an individual. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).