Sandra Spanier is Professor of English at The Pennsylvania State University and General Editor of the Hemingway Letters Project, which will result in the publication by Cambridge University Press of a 12-volume scholarly edition of the writer's estimated 6000-7000 letters. This long-term project is supported in part by a Scholarly Editions Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been designated a “We the People" project, "a special recognition by the NEH for model projects that advance the study, teaching, and understanding of American history and culture."  

Spanier teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American literature and serves on the executive committee of the English Department’s American Women Writers Workshop. 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 keynote speaker at events sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute, the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, the Michigan Hemingway Society, and the Sun Valley Hemingway Festival, and was an Interport Lecturer on Hemingway and Cuba for the Semester at Sea Program. She has served as consultant to several documentary films, 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 Vigia Preservation Foundation.

Her book, Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986), was the first to be published about that overlooked American woman writer (1902-1992), and she is completing the authorized edition of Boyle's letters, a project for which she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 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 interested in the work of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), whose marriage to Hemingway in the 1940s has threatened to this day to eclipse her own achievements as journalist and fiction writer. She worked with Gellhorn to bring into print her previously unpublished 1946 play, Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts (1995), featuring two women war correspondents and the ex-husband of one, whom she divorced on the grounds of plagiarism. Spanier is co-editor (with David Morrell) of American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young (2002). Young, a Penn State Evan Pugh Professor who wrote the first book about Hemingway in the early 1950s, served as her doctoral mentor.

Sandra Spanier earned her Ph.D. in English in 1981 from The Pennsylvania State University, where she was an Edwin Earle Sparks Fellow. She earned her Master's degree in English from Penn State and her Bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago. While pursuing her graduate studies, she also taught English in the State College Area School District from 1973 to 1981. She 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.

For more details about the Hemingway Letters Project see http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/#lettersproj.asp

 

Books

Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Paperback ed. New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1988.

Life Being the Best and Other Stories by Kay Boyle. Ed. and with an introduction by Sandra Whipple Spanier. New York : New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988. Trans. by Gloria Uya as Kay Boyle, Relatos (Falsamente) Inocentes (Barcelona: ICARIA Literaria, 1990).

Love Goes to Press: A Comedy in Three Acts by Martha Gellhorn and Virginia Cowles. With an introduction by Martha Gellhorn. Ed. and with an afterword by Sandra Spanier. Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

American Fiction, American Myth: Essays by Philip Young. Ed. David Morrell and Sandra Spanier, with a foreword by David Morrell and an introduction by Sandra Spanier. University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.

Process: A Novel by Kay Boyle. Ed. and with an introduction by Sandra Spanier. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2001.

 

Selected Articles

“Catherine Barkley and the Hemingway Code: Ritual and Survival in A Farewell to Arms .” In Modern Critical Interpretations: A Farewell to Arms , ed. Harold Bloom. New Haven , CT : Chelsea House, 1987, 131–48.

“Kay Boyle: ‘No Past Tense Permitted.'” Twentieth Century Literature 34 (Fall 1988): 245–57. Critical introduction to issue.
“Hemingway's Unknown Soldier: Catherine Barkley, the Critics, and the Great War.” In New Essays on A Farewell to Arms, ed. Scott Donaldson. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990, 75–108.

“‘I Can't Go On, I'll Go On': Kay Boyle's Lullaby of Incarceration and Cancer.” Prairie Schooner (Summer 1999): 5–23.
“No Communion with Despair: Kay Boyle on Cancer.” In Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer , ed. Hilda Raz. New York : Persea Books, 1999, 156–69.

“Rivalry, Romance, and War Reporters: Martha Gellhorn's Love Goes to Press and the Collier's Files.” In Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice , eds. Lawrence Broer and Gloria Holland. Tuscaloosa : University of Alabama Press, 2002, 256–75.

“‘ Paris Wasn't Like That': Kay Boyle and the Last of the Lost Generation.” In Lives Out of Letters: Essays in American Literary Biography and Documentation, in Honor of Robert N. Hudspeth , ed. Robert Habich. Teaneck , NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004, 169–88.

 

Selected Honors, Grants, and Awards

• Edwin Erle Sparks Fellowship (to support doctoral study), The Pennsylvania State University, 1977–1978.
• Resident Fellowship, Oregon State University Center for the Humanities, Spring 1992.
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1993–1994.
• Research and Graduate Studies Office grants, College of the Liberal Arts, The Pennsylvania State University, 1996, 1999.
• Pushcart Prize nomination for “‘I Can't Go On , I'll Go On': Kay Boyle's Lullaby of Incarceration and Cancer,” essay published in Prairie Schooner (Summer 1999).
• National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions Grant for the Hemingway Letters Project at Penn State, with special designation as a “We the People” project.

 

Selected Interviews

“The Hemingway Letters: A Shared Legacy. An Interview with Professor Sandra Spanier,” by Jorge Luna, CubaNow: The Digital Magazine of Cuban Arts and Culture, http://www.cubanow.net/people/ENG/num10/1.htm (Interviewed in Havana, January 2004.)

Hemingway in Cuba, interview for PBS Literary Explorers documentary film produced by Hilary Hemingway and Carlene Brennan (2004).

“The Last Frontier: Sandra Spanier and the Hemingway Letters,” by D.K. Higgins, State College Magazine , January 2005, pp. 43-47.

Ernest Hemingway: After the Storm, interview for PBS American Masters documentary film produced by DeWitt Sage (2005).   http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/hemingway_e_interview.html

Radio interview with Patty Satalia for “Take Note,” WPSU Penn State Public Broadcasting (first aired November 13, 2005) http://www.wpsu.org/radio/takenote.php?bookmark_id=88&view=2

Radio interview with Lisa Mullins for The World (a co-production of BBC Radio, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston), for piece entitled “Restoring Hemingway's Home, Finca Vigía” (first aired January 2006). http://www.theworld.org/worldfeature/cuba2/1.shtml

 

Selected Course Descriptions

English 232 “American Fiction From 1865”

This course will be a wide-ranging survey of American literature from the end of the Civil War through the twentieth century. We will read works in a variety of genres by a broad spectrum of American writers, both canonical and lesser known, including Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane, Kate Chopin, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Walker, and many others. Throughout, we will work toward an appreciation of the distinctive voices and achievements of individual writers as well as an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of their writing.

English 300M “Modern American Women on War”

This course will focus on the literary responses of American women writers to the wars that dominated the first half and continued to shape the remainder of the 20th Century, from the First World War to the Cold War in the aftermath of the Second. It has long been a truism that the Great War was a major impetus for the modernist revolt of the so-called "lost generation" of American writers born around the turn of the century. Yet does that generalization hold true for women writers of that generation as well? Some have argued that women, lacking direct experience of combat, face a dilemma of authority in writing authentically about war. Others argue that the rendering of the experience of war on the home front is as valid a "war story" as experience on the battlefield--that in the 20th century, as warfare has increasingly targeted civilians as much as soldiers, the boundaries between "front" and "home front" are no longer valid anyway. (Nor should we assume that all women writers lack direct exposure to combat: Martha Gellhorn, for example, served as a war correspondent from the Spanish Civil War through World War II through Vietnam and never suffered any "crisis of authority" in writing about war.) While focusing on works by American women writers, including Edith Wharton, Kay Boyle, Katherine Anne Porter, Josephine Herbst, Lillian Hellman, and Gellhorn, we will consider also a sampling of war fiction by one of the most celebrated and canonical 20th-century American male writers, Ernest Hemingway--not only to provide a context for discussion of possibly gendered literary representations of modern war, but to demonstrate that we cannot speak monolithically of war or even of a single writer's view of modern wars. One of our goals will be to see what conclusions we might be able to draw about gendered literary representations of war without stereotyping or overgeneralizing.

English 487W “Ernest Hemingway and Kay Boyle: The Left Bank and Beyond”

This course will focus on Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) and Kay Boyle (1902-1992), pioneers of American modernism who first were published in Paris in the 1920s. Both quickly earned acclaim as highly promising talents of their generation, but their careers and literary reputations later followed very different trajectories. Winner of the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature, Hemingway not only occupies a prominent place in the canon of 20th-century American writers, but he is a familiar figure in popular culture. He has been idolized for his "manly" code of grace under pressure; he has been reviled as a male chauvinist; and now he is being re-evaluated as a far more complex and nuanced writer than the stereotypes would suggest. Kay Boyle was well known for her short stories that appeared in magazines ranging from the avant-garde little magazines to the New Yorker and Saturday Evening Post, and she published over 40 books. Her "pedigree" as a distinguished writer is impeccable in terms of honors and awards, but while she continued to write into the 1990s, she never achieved the widespread recognition that many think she deserves.  Boyle and Hemingway are important and interesting both for their distinctive contributions to 20th-century American literature and for what their work and its reception reveal about 20th-century American cultural history. We will engage in close readings of their texts. We will compare their modernist textual experiments and expatriate experiences of the 1920s; we will follow the courses of their artistic development beyond the Twenties as they treat in their fiction more overtly political and social themes in the Thirties and as they become mainstream literary celebrities in the Forties; and we will explore the politics of literary reputation and canonization.

English 574 “Hemingway: Author and Icon, Texts and Contexts”

Few writers have commanded such widespread interest, both inside and outside of academe, or continually provoked such strong reactions, from hero-worship to disdain. Love him or hate him, Hemingway made an indelible impact on 20th-century English-language literature and culture. In this course we will examine in depth the texts and the contexts of his work and explore the relationship between author and icon. We will examine the early work of a zealous young apprentice making his mark on modernism among the expatriate avant-garde in Paris in the Twenties in the short stories of In Our Time and in the novels that catapulted him to fame by the age of 30: The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. We will follow him through the 1930s as he continued his modernist experiments in genre and form in nonfiction works like Green Hills of Africa, wrote regularly for the mass market audience of Esquire magazine, and reflected the social and political upheavals of the decade in To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls . We will follow him through the 1940s, by which time the legend of the writer had taken on a life of its own and perhaps began to drive the writing in a decade that produced only one novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, widely considered his worst. We also will consider the work of Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), whose identification as "Hemingway's third wife" (from 1940-45) has threatened to this day to eclipse her own considerable achievements as a fiction writer and journalist. Finally, we will follow Hemingway through the Cold War, the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1954, his decline and death in 1961, and into his prolific posthumous career, including The Garden of Eden (1986), which unsettled long-established assumptions about Hemingway and gender and fueled a resurgence of interest in his work by a new breed of critics. We will look at the continually evolving critical responses to his work, including recent interest in gender-based, ecocritical, and multicultural issues. Throughout, we will balance a close examination of the texts themselves with a consideration of the shifting contexts--personal, literary, social, political, economic—in which they were created.

English 574 “Expatriate American Modernists”

This course will focus on American expatriate writers between the World Wars.  Many were born around the turn into the 20th century and came of age during the Great War, which Malcolm Cowley described as "a watershed" that gave young writers "the feeling of having lived in two eras, almost on two different planets."  Gertrude Stein called them a "lost generation"--a label most of its members contested.  It was a time that engendered searching for values (many of the traditional ones having been shattered), acts of rebellion against social and literary complacency and conventions, and movements like the "Revolution of the Word" (dedicated, in Kay Boyle's words, to creating a "lively, wholly American, grandly experimental and furiously disrespectful school of writing").  We will revisit Paris in the Twenties, examining the fiction of such famous modernists as Hemingway, Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, along with their lesser known contemporaries (Robert McAlmon, Ernest Walsh, Zelda Fitzgerald).  We will also consider the work of those who went elsewhere and/or stayed abroad after the crash of 1929 (Katherine Anne Porter to Mexico and Germany, Kay Boyle from Paris to Austria to Vichy France ).  We will examine various writers' experiments in genre and form as well as what happens when avant-garde sensibilities meet the rise of Fascism in the Thirties.  We will also interrogate long-held definitions and assumptions about modernism that have excluded the work of some writers (many of them women) from serious critical consideration over the decades by dismissing it as "sentimental," “popular,” or "political."