A boat like this will carry a lot of chin stubble.

That was Ernest Hemingway’s comical way of telling a friend, via letter, that he need not worry about shaving on an upcoming fishing expedition aboard Pilar, Hemingway’s 38-foot yacht.

It was the mid-1930s, a period that Hemingway spent largely on the water, splitting his time between Key West, Fla; Havana and Bimini, Bahamas.

When he wasn’t catching gigantic tuna and record-breaking sharks, Hemingway wrote letters — hundreds of them.

Now, 361 of those letters penned by the acclaimed novelist from 1934 to 1936 are available to read in the latest volume of The Hemingway Letters Project: a massive, Penn State-based undertaking to organize, contextualize and publish some 6,500 letters written by Hemingway during his lifetime.

This volume, published in July, is the sixth of a projected 17 volumes that will be compiled. The first volume was published in 2011.

The project came about after Patrick Hemingway, the author’s son, pushed for a scholarly edition of his father’s letters. About 85% of the letters included in the project’s volumes have never been published before.

“[Patrick Hemingway] thought that the [letters] would show many different sides of his father that would humanize him, but also that [the letters] are a real record of the first half of the 20th century. It’s an eyewitness record to history,” said Sandra Spanier, a Penn State English professor who serves as the project’s general editor.

“They say that journalism is the rough draft of history. Well, I would say the same thing about these collective letters. It’s raw footage, unedited.”

The project earned the Penn State-based team a Lyman H. Butterfield Award this year, and it made national news in 2022 when Penn State University Libraries acquired the Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway that contained unpublished writing, manuscripts, letters and over 1,000 photos.

The sixth volume opens several months after Hemingway had purchased Pilar. Many of the letters center around Hemingway’s passion for fishing, making this volume “fascinating” for those interested in angling, said Verna Kale, associate editor of the project and associate English professor at Penn State.

Though Hemingway is known for fly fishing, this volume presents the author as a deep sea angler. His fishing experiences documented in these letters would go on to inspire one of his most famous works, “The Old Man and the Sea,” Published in 1952, the novella earned Hemingway a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Nobel Prize for Literature.

“Some of the kernels of that story are in some of the anecdotes he tells and writes about during the period of volume six — fishing with the local Cubans, learning about the Gulf Stream and becoming a self-taught expert on Atlantic game fish,” Ms. Kale said.

The letters also offer insight into Hemingway’s reactions to political unrest in Europe. After Italy invaded Ethiopia in fall 1935, he cautioned that Benito Mussolini needed to be stopped immediately or fascism could spread all over Europe, Ms. Spanier recalled.

And, while Hemingway’s sense of humor shines in some letters, others demonstrate the author’s empathy. In one, he sends a touching note to a friend whose teenage son had just died. In another, he gives advice to a budding author. And in yet another, he writes back to a fan who had asked if the 20th-century writer remembered meeting him at a diner.

“It really humanizes this Nobel laureate who has this this persona of being very gruff and tough and competitive — which he was and could be — but he also could be very warm and kind and generous,” Ms. Spanier said.

As Hemingway wrote the letters in this volume, he also penned two of his most famous short stories: “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Ms. Spanier estimated that five or six years of work went into publishing the sixth volume. Dozens worked on this volume, including more than 20 graduate research assistants and undergraduate interns.

Ashleigh Earyes, a Penn State graduate student, did data entry for the project as an undergraduate intern. Ms. Earyes was “honored” to work on the project after reading a lot of Hemingway as an English and creative writing student.

She added that the research component of her work will come in handy as she plans to become a high school teacher someday.

“It didn't feel like a job and it has never felt like a job,” Ms. Earyes said. “It feels more like just a group of people wanting to spread the letters and information about Hemingway that a lot of people don't know.”

First Published: August 2, 2024, 9:14 p.m.
Updated: August 2, 2024, 11:35 p.m.