At 鶹ý, academic excellence is brought to life through the expertise and dedication of scholars like Robert W. Trogdon, Ph.D., professor of English, who dedicated years to his newest volume of editions of three classic Ernest Hemingway books.
Trogdon is a scholar of 20th-century American literature and textual editing and has, since 2018, been working on editions for two volumes of Ernest Hemingway books. He has written extensively on Ernest Hemingway's works and served as an editor for The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway.
When he was in high school, he read “The Old Man and the Sea" by Hemingway and fell in love with it. In college, he had the luck of working with a professor on a large-volume Hemingway biography.
“I liked to see how the works developed and everything that comes before the published version of the work,” Trogdon told Kent State Today.
Hemingway was wounded working as an ambulance driver during World War I. In 1921, Trogdon says Hemingway traveled to Paris and began writing, publishing his first book in 1925 and following it up with “The Sun Also Rises," which was a huge success.
In 2018, Trogdon was invited by the Library of America to work on Hemingway editions to correct the errors and language in the texts.
“In the 1920s and 1930s, publishing standards and morals were different,” Trogdon said. “Certain things they considered to be obscene were not allowed to be published.”
At the time, Hemingway wanted to respect the language that men and soldiers used in his work. Trogdon valued correcting and publishing the works the way the writer intended for them to be published.
Trogdon’s volume of Hemingway’s first three books was published in 2020, including “The Torrents of Spring,” “In Our Time” and “The Sun Also Rises.”
As he began working on another volume in 2021, the major challenge for Trogdon was visiting the repository where most of Hemingway’s manuscripts reside. Trogdon went to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston during the summer of 2023 to examine the materials on site.
In October 2024, his volume of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” “Men Without Women” and “Death in the Afternoon” were published. In both of Trogdon’s volumes, the way he restored the books gives a clearer indication of Hemingway’s intentions and the portrayal of his characters.
“In Hemingway’s published work, we get a skewed view of the past and what it was like for the characters,” Trogdon said. “The language Hemingway used shows a little more of the stress the characters were under, their level of anger and the situation they find themselves in.”
This contrast between Hemingway’s published work and the author’s original intentions highlights Trogdon’s belief in honoring a writer’s vision in how their work is presented.
“I think it’s important that writers are treated with respect and the greatest way to respect them is to present the works as they wanted them presented,” Trogdon said.