What do you do during your free time? Play video games? Watch TV? Check Tiger Woods’ Twitter? As detailed in a recent Centre Daily Times article, Sandra Spanier, a Penn State English professor and wife of Graham Spanier, leads a 15-year effort to publish an extensive, complete volume of the correspondence of Ernest Hemingway.

Along with other scholars, Professor Spanier has tracked down hundreds of letters written by the great American author, some dating as far back as 1918, when Hemingway was a teenager in the army. The letters are then painstakingly entered into a computer by hand, and archived.

The group has recently made huge amounts of progress since receiving the last private collection of Hemingway letters in 2006. That collection of 100 letters, postcards, cables, and notes was donated by Hemingway’s nephew, Ernest Mainland (center in picture), and has led to a different portrayal of Hemingway’s demeanor; a softer, more compassionate side. Through their work, the group has nearly completed what will be the most thorough and extensive look into the mind of one of the greatest writers of our time.

President of Penn State? English professor extraordinaire? Magician? Musician? Mr. and Mrs. Spanier, please adopt me and give me your genes!

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