The Letters of Ernest Hemingway

This first of an eventual 12 volumes in Cambridge's ambitious program to publish all of Hemingway's roughly 6000 letters covers his childhood through his early apprenticeship in expatriate Paris. These juvenile missives are lighthearted and rife with slang and fabricated words, and Hemingway employs multiple silly nicknames for everyone, including himself. Ernest seems a very loving son and brother and a good pal. Though most of these juvenile missives (or screeds) are fairly routine, they reveal his developing voice—e.g., notes to his siblings and friends use vastly different language and tone from those to his parents. Readers can occasionally spy his BS machine forming—at 19 he's already embellishing stories about himself (e.g., he claims he carried "a Colt gat" as a cub reporter and beat a champion boxer). Each letter is well footnoted, and Spanier (English, Pennsylvania State Univ.) and Trogdon (English, Kent State Univ.) include numerous scholarly extras.