Samantha Guss

Hemingway at Penn State

Two years and hundreds of hours later, I can still remember the day I first heard about the Hemingway Letters Project. I was halfway through my junior year in college and had successfully completed my first semester as English major. After several unhappy years in science, I was relieved to find classes that I could really enjoy, but, for the first time in my life, I was unsure of where they would lead me. Like many confused undergraduates, I turned to my friend Liz Jenkins, the English Internship Coordinator. It was already a week into the spring semester and I was struggling to pick up an extra class when Liz suggested that I do an internship instead. She explained that someone had left a position working on Professor Sandra Spanier's Hemingway Letters Project, and she thought I might be a good person to fill it. Perhaps it would only be busy work like transcribing and scanning, but it could give me some good experience for my résumé. Trusting her judgment (which has yet to lead me astray), I agreed: she would give my name to LaVerne Maginnis, the associate editor of the project, who would schedule an interview. LaVerne called me that same day, interviewed me the next, and invited me to start the following Monday. The rest is history.

The Hemingway Letters Project, which began at Penn State in 2003, is an endeavor to publish a multi-volume scholarly edition of all of Ernest Hemingway's correspondence, much of it for the first time. Copies of the letters are collected from repositories and individuals around the world, transcribed, scanned, and catalogued--all in two small offices on the second floor of Burrowes Building. Dr. Spanier, the general editor, is joined by half a dozen consulting scholars/volume editors, together making up a virtual who's who of internationally renowned Hemingway scholars. LaVerne manages the office and takes care of countless editing and administrative tasks, and there are also graduate assistants and student interns on hand to assist with the work. That day in January 2005, I joined the long legacy of Hemingway Letters Project interns.

In that first semester, I learned how to transcribe, scan, and enter letters into DocuShare, the project's database software. I was assigned a folder called "PUL Folder 19"--the nineteenth folder (of more than 30!) of letters from Princeton University Library. These were letters Ernest Hemingway had written to his publisher and friend Charlie Scribner in 1948 and 1949. I didn't know it at the time, but these would end up being some of the most interesting pieces I ever came across: ones that I would read again as a senior doing research for my Honors thesis. Over those few months, I painstakingly transferred into Microsoft Word files every word that "EH" (as he's known around the office) wrote, often struggling to read his sprawling handwriting. Transcribing wasn't always exciting, and scanning was even less so, but I took great pleasure in methodically entering each piece into DocuShare and watching my completed work stack up. I also got to know Hemingway as a person rather than as a celebrity. The pages were filled with insightful, funny, tender, and often unremarkable commentary on EH's life or the latest news--presenting a very different man than the macho persona that persists in popular culture. The other interns and I often discussed things we had read in the letters, and we were always encouraged to learn more about Hemingway. Never before had I been in an atmosphere where everyone was so genuinely interested in their work and excited about the product being produced. I was invited to stay on the project after I finished my first semester, and I was given some more complex tasks.

I worked with Excel and Access databases to organize letters, and I updated them when we learned new information. I learned team-proofreading, observed an NEH grant application take shape, and observed as editorial procedures were formed. Sometimes I was asked to develop procedures, and I loved the challenge of writing them up as clearly and concisely as possible. I learned that office equipment often doesn't function properly, that I am capable of solving many of these problems, and that work must go on regardless. More importantly, I got my first taste of a project that took more than a week or two to complete: I learned to value and take pride in work that wasn't yet a finished product. Best of all, I found that I enjoyed this type of work, and that I was good at it. I learned about positions I never knew existed and worked with people who truly enjoy their jobs. As an added bonus, I learned a lot about Hemingway, Hemingway studies, and the people and places that made up his life, including quirky trivia that no one would ever need to know--much to my delight.

I can think of a few favorite moments: the thrilled look on a visiting scholar's face when I found an obscure letter for him in DocuShare, sorting through the archives of EH's biographer on the trip LaVerne and I took to Princeton Library, and, of course, seeing my first authentic Hemingway letter after months of seeing only photocopies. Maybe even better was a time last summer when I was working on my thesis. I pulled a book out of the Pattee Library stacks called Hemingway on Love, and found that it was filled with someone's messy handwriting--handwriting that I knew I had seen before. With a little more research, I realized that this was the very book that Penn State professor (and one of the first Hemingway scholars) Philip Young had reviewed for the New York Times in 1966. Perhaps no one had noticed it before, and maybe no one will again. At that moment I felt like I really understood Penn State's rich heritage in American Literature studies and felt like I was a part of it--opportunities I might not have had if not for my internship.

Liz Jenkins was right--my experience at the Hemingway Letters Project was good for my resume. I suspect she also knew that it would give me a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, and those are things I might not have found in a classroom.

Works Cited

Young, Philip. "In Our Time." New York Times: February 16, 1966, p. 283.