News Release

BOISE STATE NEWS RELEASE/September 16, 2008

Family of Hemingway Scholar Donates Collection to Boise State's Albertsons Library

Ernest Hemingway scholars, Boise State students and faculty, and the Treasure Valley community have a new asset for their study and pleasure — the John Robert Bittner Collection on Ernest Hemingway.

Housed in the Special Collections Department of Boise State’s Albertsons Library, the Bittner Collection consists of 300 research books on Hemingway's life and writings, supplemented by works on the expatriate life of 1920s Paris, Spanish bullfighters of Hemingway’s era, Hemingway’s editor Maxwell Perkins and other Hemingway literary associates.

Hemingway first came to Idaho in the 1930s to hunt, fish and write in Sun Valley and died in Idaho at his home in Ketchum in 1961.

Denise Alexander Bittner of Eagle donated the collection in memory of her late husband, John Robert Bittner. John Bittner was a Hemingway scholar and award-winning professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who died of pancreatic cancer in 2002 at the age of 58.

Professor Bittner assembled the collection during the course of many years of research and writing about Hemingway. Additional material from Bittner’s research and writings on Hemingway is archived in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston and the Ketchum, Idaho, Community Library. Bittner is buried 10 feet from Hemingway in the Ketchum Cemetery.

The collection was formally accepted and dedicated Sept. 8 in the Albertsons Library at a reception for family and friends of the Bittners.

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Media Contact: Kathleen Craven, University Communications, (208) 426-3275, kcraven@boisestate.edu

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Last reviewed on Tuesday, September 16, 2008