MLR, ., right arm following an automobile accident outside of Billings. Aer two months in hospital and another half year before he was able to gain reasonable mobility in his writing arm, Hemingway slowly restarted work on Death in the Aernoon, travelling to Spain in to continue writing and to gather photographs for the book—all the while relishing being there during the civil unrest leading to the downfall of the Spanish monarchy. As he regained his momentum, we see the word-driven Hemingway, willing to learn to write with his le hand if necessary, the writer dedicated to his cra and opposed to selling out his personal life to an increasingly inquisitive public and intrusive media. Earlier he had written: ‘My only pride is of a certain artistic and financial integrity—in all other ways in life I have made an ass of myself’ (p. ). Yet this volume also shows a Hemingway truly concerned about the lives of his friends, even absent ones such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, immersed in his wife’s mentalhealth crisis, and others going through rough patches. e author asks Waldo Pierce to help a mutual friend who is down-and-out in Paris: ‘See that Guy Fangel doesn’t starve or have to hit the Seine will you? [. . .]. Any money you can ever loan him tell me and I will repay you’ (p. ). Hemingway as the public figure with a feuding personality will emerge in the s, but at the turn of the decade his letters reveal a great deal of warmth, generosity, vitality, and simple humanity. Much of the credit for the success of the Hemingway Letters Project goes to the general editor, Sandra Spanier of Pennsylvania State University. She and Miriam B. Mandel have edited this volume along with associate editors J. Gerald Kennedy, Rena Sanderson, and Albert J. DeFazio III. eir work is impeccable, from the punctilious transcription rules to cross- and multiple-editing, scrupulously researched footnotes, and scholarly appurtenances including a roster of correspondents, a calendar of letters, an index of recipients, a meticulous and thorough general index, as well as seven maps and thirty-two illustrations. Scott Donaldson’s Introduction to Volume demonstrates this eminent biographer’s critical insight and exhibits a mastery of style equal to his subject. L H U W B Ted Hughes in Context. Ed. by T G. (Literature in Context) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . xxvii+ pp. £. ISBN ––– –. How to present Ted Hughes in context? Like many of the major writers covered by the Literature in Context series, he produced work that was thematically, generically , and intertextually various. But his work is also exceptional in being the product of a total immersion in world literatures and cultures. In the popular imagination, Hughes is arguably most famous as the husband of Sylvia Plath, as the author of a handful of poems about animals, or (for younger readers) as the writer behind e Iron Man. In fact, Hughes’s contribution to twentieth-century culture is far more considerable and diverse. e work he produced over five decades amounts to much more than many writers are able to summon in their lifetime. In his Introduction to Reviews Ted Hughes in Context, Terry Gifford writes that ‘No single scholar could know all that Hughes knew or even have read all that Hughes had read during his sixty-eight years’ (p. xv). e task of contextualizing him, then, is a somewhat daunting one. But Gifford himself, a leading authority on Hughes, is best placed to take on this task, and the contributions he has gathered do an excellent job of assembling a jigsaw of Hughesian contexts. Ted Hughes in Context represents a vital resource for two main reasons. e first is its usefulness: the volume comprises thirty-six short essays (generally around ten pages each in length), covering a wide range of topics and written with clarity by contributors including junior and senior scholars, archivists, and Hughes obsessives. Individual sections and chapters have been given plain, unfussy titles: ‘Literary Contexts’, ‘Biographical Contexts’, ‘Hughes and Religion’, ‘Hughes and War’. Students and scholars of Hughes’s work, therefore, now have an obvious first port of call, whether they require...
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Jun 20, 2023
Hallvard Moe 
Open Access
