3:00 - 4:30 PM (OPPL, Veterans Room, Second Floor)
This year is the 100th anniversary of a strikingly original collection of short stories and accompanying vignettes that marked Ernest Hemingway's American debut, called In Our Time. It is fitting that we welcome the editor of Norton Critical Edition of In Our Time, Professor J. Gerald Kennedy for this year’s Hemingway Birthday Lecture titled, The Rough Edges of In Our Time.
“This concise yet comprehensive edition of Hemingway’s first major work, In Our Time (1925), offers an accessible introduction, an authoritative text, and a valuable selection of contextualizing materials. In a single volume, it brings together a relevant sample of Hemingway’s early journalism, correspondence, initial reviews of the book, and an indispensable selection of recent criticism.” —Zena Meadowsong, Rowan University
J. Gerald Kennedy, Boyd Professor of English Emeritus, is a former chair of the Department of English. In 1973, he earned his PhD from Duke University and took a position at LSU. A Fulbright Junior Lectureship in France in 1978-79 encouraged him to establish LSU in Paris, a summer program he directed intermittently from 1981-99. His books include The Astonished Traveler: William Darby, Frontier Geographer and Man of Letters (LSU Press, 1981); Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (Yale, 1987); Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (Yale 1993); a second book on Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the Abyss of Interpretation (Twayne, 1994); and a broad-scale cultural history, Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford, 2016). He has also edited Modern American Short Story Sequences (Cambridge, 1995), A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford, 2001), The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006), The Life of Black Hawk (Penguin Classics, 2008), and a Norton Critical Edition of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time (2022). He has likewise co-edited French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad (St. Martins, 1998); Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (Oxford, 2001); Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture (LSU Press, 2012); The American Novel to 1870 (Oxford 2014); and The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (2019). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as a Louisiana Atlas Grant and two Taylor Fellowships from the University of Virginia. His ongoing projects include a cultural biography of Poe and a co-edited volume (The Final Years, 1957-61) for the ongoing Cambridge edition of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway.