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When Earnest Hemingway went off to World War I, in the summer of 1918, he was only 18 years old.
"Oh boy I'm glad I'm in it" he would write his boyhood friends back home, shortly before he was seriously
wounded on the Italian front, while delivering supplies to the men in the trenches.
His life would change over night.
He would later reflect on the aftermath of battle where in there was so many dead Austrians and
prisoners the ground was almost blackened with them.
Hemingway later replaced that real life scene in his earliest stories featuring Nick Adams, who sees
what had happened by the position of the dead. "They lay alone or in clumps in the high grass of the field
and along the road, their pockets out and over them were flies and around each body or groups of bodies
were the scattered papers and the letters, letters, letters."
There was always much paper about the dead and the debris about this attack was no exception.
The forth coming publication of the Cambridge edition of the letters of Earnest Hemingway, which has
its home base here at Penn State under the general editorship of Sandra Spanier and a team of scholars,
will give us access to Hemingway's own letters, letters, letters, many of them previously unpublished.
Volume One, due out in September, will challenge the stereotypical image of Hemingway as a "he-man" by
revealing a more complex individual and writer.
Follow along with me this year as we explore Hemingway's epistolary art to discover how a midwestern
boy becomes, seemingly over night, the father of modern American pros as he embraces Paris and modernism.