LITERATURE: Ready for the shelves; Hemingway book edited by UND professor set for launch next week

Robert Lewis is much relieved.

The painstaking efforts the UND professor emeritus took to edit the 850-page manuscript of Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway are done, and the book is all set to hit bookstores.

This is the last of Hemingway’s manuscripts to be published in its entirety, he says.

Launch of the novel, titled “Under Kilimanjaro,” is scheduled at 4 p.m. Tuesday in the North Dakota Museum of Art.

Associate editor Robert Fleming and editor-in-chief Joanna Craig, from Kent (Ohio) State University, are scheduled to be present at the launch. Kent State University Press is publishing the book.

Terming it as one of the most important and valuable project of his life, Lewis said: “I enjoyed every part of it. This has been a great experience.”

“Hemingway’s writing is a great responsibility and a great honor. I am lucky enough to do that,” he said. “At times, it was like solving a puzzle.”

In fact, he said editing the manuscripts of a great writer and a Nobel laureate was a learning experience. He even learned a few additional rules of English grammar and became acquainted with new words from other languages used by Hemingway in his manuscript.

The book

Spread into 456 pages, excluding a 15-page introduction, the novel has 40 chapters. Under Kilimanjaro,” he said, is based on Hemingway’s experiences from an actual African safari, months before he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. It was probably written a year later in 1955-56.

An abridged version of the book, titled “True at First Light,” was published in 1999, he said.

For the convenience of readers, Lewis said he added three appendixes: a glossary of foreign terms and their meanings, a list of characters and their introduction and textual notes.

The inside covers and first and last pages feature reproductions of Hemingway’s manuscripts, both hand written and typed.

Lewis said now he’s eagerly awaiting its review.

Next projects

Having successfully completed editing the novel, Lewis has now started another project on the Nobel laureate. He is editing a series of books on Hemingway’s writings.

The first of the series, “The Sun Also Rises,” is expected to be out next summer. Plans are to bring out two books a year, he said.

Lewis is also planning to resume working on a book about his own family history that he was writing before taking up this project. “I had written four chapters. I kept it aside during these years,” he said.

Considered to be an authority on the writings of Hemingway, Lewis has written three books and several papers on the great American writer.