Sandra Spanier

Sandra Spanier is Professor of English and General Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project.  This long-term effort will result in the publication of a comprehensive scholarly edition of the writer’s some 6,000 letters in more than a dozen volumes by Cambridge University Press.  Headquartered at Penn State and involving an international team of scholars, the Project has been supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 1, 1907-1922, edited by Sandra Spanier and Robert W. Trogdon, will be published in September 2011. 

Spanier teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature, with a particular interest in modernism and expatriate writers between the World Wars.  Her essays on Hemingway have appeared in Modern Critical Interpretations: A Farewell to Arms (1987), New Essays on A Farewell to Arms (1990), and Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice (2002).  She has served on the Editorial Board of The Hemingway Review since 1992 and as a consultant to Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers since 1997.  She has served as consultant to several documentary films about Hemingway, including the PBS American Masters Series.  She has been active in international collaborative efforts to conserve Hemingway's papers in Cuba and restore his long-time home outside Havana and is on the Board of the Finca Vigía Foundation, which works to preserve Hemingway’s legacy in Cuba.

Her book Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986) was the first to be published about that distinguished and prolific American writer (1902-1992).   She has edited and introduced Life Being the Best and Other Stories by Kay Boyle (1988) and Process: A Novel by Kay Boyle (2001)—Boyle's long-lost first novel, the manuscript missing since the 1920s until Spanier discovered it in an archive.  She is also the co-editor (with David Morrell) of American Fiction, American Myth (2000)--a collection of essays by Penn State Evan Pugh Professor Philip Young, one of the earliest and most influential Hemingway scholars and her doctoral mentor.  

She is also interested in the work of journalist and fiction writer Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), who did not wish to be remembered for her marriage to Hemingway in the 1940s.   Spanier worked with Gellhorn to bring into print her previously unpublished 1946 play, Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts (1995; revised edn. 2010).  In the play’s comic battle of the sexes, set during World War II, the protagonists bear a striking resemblance to Hemingway and Gellhorn.  

Spanier held faculty appointments at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Oregon State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, before returning to the Penn State Department of English in 1995.