'The Sun Also Rises' at 100: Women are now leaders in Hemingway scholarship

Hilary K. Justice, an Ernest Hemingway scholar at Boston's John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, remembers having to defend her chosen field of expertise as a graduate student some 30 years ago.“I was told that studying Hemingway amounted to committing professional suicide — ‘Haven’t we killed him yet?’ was the comment of one professor in my PhD program,” she said in a recent interview.

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Justice oversees the Hemingway collection at the JFK library, where the author's papers are stored. “I used to be able to count on being asked ‘How do you, as a woman, justify studying Hemingway?’ at every Q Sandra Spanier, general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project; and Suzanne del Gizzo, editor of The Hemingway Review. Kale, an associate editor for the Hemingway letters project and the editor of a Norton Library edition of “The Sun Also Rises,” is a self-identified Gen-Xer who started out as a student of medieval literature. She changed her focus after experiencing a Hemingway-esque e