The Essential Hemingway

by Ernest Hemingway

It has been said of Ernest Hemingway that half the writers of the twentieth century have tried to imitate him and the other half have tried not to. A towering figure in the pantheon of American letters, the leading voice of the 'lost generation', winner of the Nobel Prize for literature and a Pulitzer Prize, Hemingway is known around the world for the brilliance of his writing. The Essential Hemmingway is the perfect introduction to his astonishing, wide-ranging body of work. This impressive collection includes the full text of Fiesta, Hemingway's first major novel; long extracts from his three greatest works of fiction, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls; twenty-five complete stories; and the breathtaking epilogue to Death in the Afternoon.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, Short Stories, American, Literature, Modern Classics, Novels

507 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a journalist and which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh Hemingway in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, on July 2, 1961 (a couple weeks before his 62nd birthday), he killed himself using one of his shotguns.

Reviews

[Peter Cawdron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hemingway was darker than I expected. The writing is concise but feels dated. There's almost no thoughts or feelings conveyed, but his command of dialogue and impending moments is compelling.

As an author, I think it's important to read outside of my chosen genre, so I picked up Hemingway and enjoyed his guttural style.

[Kmaceross · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this book expecting to love it considering all the praise that I have heard about Hemingway and also because of the fact that I have read and liked many quotes from him, but sadly, I did not. I really had to push myself to even finish it and am glad that I read this book before diving into one of his full-length novels. I think I will stick to reading his quotes from now on.

[Saul Connelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a little while, good until he keeps going on about bull fighting and the first world war.

[Rebecca Delaney]

Esta antologia consta de cuentos, la nouvelle Fiesta y fragmentos de sus novelas. Los fragmentos no los leí salvo por el epilogo de Death in the Afternoon. Sinceramente no entiendo por qué no incluyeron The Old Man and the Sea en vez de estos.
Tampoco estoy de acuerdo con colocar Fiesta al principio del libro. Las primeras 80 pág me aburrieron muchisimo, sólo continué leyendo porque ya conocia a Hemingway y sabia que iba a valer la pena pero para alguien que elige este libro como introducción a Hemingway me parece que el orden de todo está al revés (y que no incluir The Old Man AndThe Sea es pecado)
En mi opinión deberian haber comenzado con las short stories y especificamente con las 3 de Winner Take Nothing (A Clean Well Lighted Place, es mi favorita) o con The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.

Y ahora sobre lo que más me gustó de esta selección, además de las dos ya mencionadas fueron:
-Soldier's Home
-My Old Man
-Hills Like White Elephants
-The Killers
-Fiesta
-El epilogo de Death in the Afternoon

[Sean de la Rosa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hemmingway, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 most definitely experienced a significant amount of war and times of uncertainty in his lifetime - this forms a major portion of the material he uses.

The verdict: I read through all 500 pages or so and did not enjoy the book as much as I was expecting to. At the end of each chapter I sat asking the question: so what? I guess its just like people say: different strokes for different folks.

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

She opened up the laptop. It was a nice laptop. She pressed the button to take the laptop out of standby. She went to the tab with GoodReads and found the book.

"I don't like this style of writing at all," she wrote. "I think I can safely conclude I don't like Hemingway."

[Gavin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yep, this is the Hemingway to read - a best of, really, but you don't necessarily need more than that.

With such a seemingly simple, paratactic style, I at first questioned - how could he be considered a "genius"? Florid Nabokov is "genius", labyrinthine Joyce is "genius" - Hemingway just seems to write what he sees! But he is a genius, or at least I'm a big big fan of his, despite all the feminist criticism (I think they miss the point - I think he embraces castration as much as you would like to enact it upon him). It's not what he writes, it's what he doesn't write. That's where the brilliance lies. That may sound needlessly oblique, but I 100% believe it. I haven't read anything quite so good for a while now.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

despite reading this book for so long, upon retrospect I can say that it has changed my perception of short stories. It’s incredible how hemingway can create such detailed, contemplative stories with such little activity in quite a short space.

[S M H]

Ain't giving it a review because I never finished a single story. Not a fan of the minimalist prose.

[Jorden Kuijper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I like his short stories much more than his prose, reading Hemingway has a clear-cut soothing effect.

[Tino · Rating 3 out of 5]

I suppose an okay introduction to Hemingway but didn’t really understand why these specific chapters were chosen. Would’ve been nice with some kind of notes on the selection process. 3 stars.

[RINCO · Rating 2 out of 5]

1 star for his writing, 1 star for some of the good quotes. It's a shame that I didn't like his stories but enjoyed his writing.

[Sien Eelen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hills like white elephants
A very short story
Cat in the rain
L’envoi
🫶

[Katja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lang geleden was ik zeer onder de indruk van The old man and the sea. In deze bundel staat dat boek ook. Dit keer heb ik alleen de verhalen gelezen. Hemingway maakt steeds goed duidelijk waar een verhaal zich afspeelt. Zijn natuurbeschrijvingen zijn geweldig en gedetailleerd. Big Two-Hearted River I en II gaan over een voettocht van zijn alter ego door ruig gebied, het kamperen en het vangen van krekels als voer voor de forel. De jonge forel gooit hij terug. Eén ontsnapt er en Nick voelt de pijn van de haak in diens lip. Curieus als je bedenkt dat Hemingway bovendien dol is op jagen en stierenvechten. Een reviewer vindt Nick een onsympatiek personage. Dat vind ik niet. Hemingway put zich niet uit in het beschrijven van gevoelens, die zijn er echter wel degelijk, ik denk dat ze dat bedoelt. Ik vind het prachtig hoe uitgebeend zijn verhalen zijn. Sommige zijn behoorlijk spannend, die lees ik liever dan alleen de natuurbeschrijvingen. De meeste zijn afgeronde verhalen. Dat kun je kunstmatig vinden, mij stoorde het niet. Niet alle verhalen vind ik even goed, maar in een bloemlezing maakt iedereen nu eenmaal andere keuzes. Het verbaast mij niet dat hij de nobelprijs won. Ik zou zeggen, lees een ander verhaal en laat je oordeel niet van één verhaal afhangen.

[Claudi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little more of a preamble to the extracts might help the reader to keep track of the action - by consistently beginning in media res, with little in the way of setting, one comes away with the sense that this is a collection of stories about a singular drunk, angry man. This is a shame because, at his best, Hemingway is a terrific writer capable of great subtlety and nuance

[Mike Futcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it," Ernest Hemingway writes in the Epilogue of Death in the Afternoon, included here as the final piece in The Essential Hemingway (pg. 499). The piece itself is an impressive one, as Hemingway presents a glorious mosaic of impressions that he had not been able to include in the body of his book, but it is also, no doubt, sequenced as the final piece in The Essential Hemingway as an acknowledgement from the editors that they cannot include everything that is impressive and essential about this author.

The Essential Hemingway was not, for me, an introduction. Hemingway has been my favourite author since I first picked up a book of his nearly eleven years ago, and this opinion has been unshakeable even as I experienced other authors, and moved from the masterpieces of his novels and short stories to his more obscure work and even the miscellanea of posthumously-published manuscripts and his Selected Letters. That said, I imagine that as an introduction The Essential Hemingway would be a perfectly fine one, as there is a good spread included here of the man's work.

Rather, for me The Essential Hemingway was a coda, an excuse to revisit some of the finest writing I had ever read, in some cases more than a decade after I last read it. I was not the biggest fan of The Sun Also Rises when I read it in early 2013, though I respected it immensely, but its inclusion (in its 200-page entirety) at the start of The Essential Hemingway was a great opportunity to revisit it with new eyes. It held up well – it is the most determinedly modern of Hemingway's novels, in the sense that his commitment to his new and original style is its most rigid and pure – and while it's still not a favourite of mine, its subtler moments were better impressed on me this time around. It's an excellent novel and this opinion overwrites any I might previously have had.

Even so, the decision to include the entire book highlights a quite natural dispute any Hemingway aficionado would have with an 'essential' or 'greatest hits' anthology – the choices made in the selections. The Sun Also Rises might have been better represented by the inclusion of its Pamplona chapters alone, with the Paris sections instead replaced with selections from A Moveable Feast. But The Essential Hemingway was published in 1947, while Hemingway was still alive and before A Moveable Feast had even been written. Nevertheless, the edition of The Essential Hemingway I read was from 2004, and it would have been to the publisher's great credit if they had revised the selections. Alongside A Moveable Feast, the absence of 1952's The Old Man and the Sea – arguably Hemingway's greatest piece, and short enough to be included in its entirety – tells us that this 1947 anthology can no longer truly claim to contain the 'essential' Hemingway.

The selections from A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are well-chosen, though the best chapters from those two novels are their devastating and eloquent final chapters – neither included here. There are good reasons for these omissions (including an ending without the context of what came before hardly does good service to a writer) but, again, their lack does not show off the best of Hemingway. The chapter from To Have and Have Not was also well-chosen – the prospect of the lights of Havana in that story shows his genius – though I still remember a stark passage on suicide by gun from that novel, which would also deserve inclusion.

I was disappointed that there was nothing of the Venetian chapters of Across the River and Into the Trees – in my opinion, a hugely under-rated novel – nor anything from Green Hills of Africa. However, regarding the latter, Hemingway's African experiences are well-covered by the inclusion of two of Hemingway's most singular masterpieces, the short stories 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber' and 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'. The former is the epitome of what a short story should be – character revealed by plot yet remaining ambiguous and multi-faceted, and storytelling depth presented with concision and eloquence. The latter is almost transcendental – a rarity for Hemingway and his most clear-sighted attempt to tackle his life-long obsession with death. It's quite something to see Hemingway turn his formidable talent to attack such an obstacle, turning his literary guns to face his own failings and neuroses decades before he would attack himself with a more literal gun. (And this is the writer that some fools claim, nowadays, to be little more than a macho stylist!) Both stories are stories that only Hemingway, with his experiences and his talent, could have written.

Speaking of short stories, The Essential Hemingway also includes the entirety of In Our Time, Hemingway's first proper short story collection. Like the inclusion of The Sun Also Rises, I felt the inclusion of the entire book was unnecessary; it would have been better to include only its best stories: 'Indian Camp', 'Soldier's Home', 'Cat in the Rain' and 'Big Two-Hearted River'. Inclusions from Hemingway's other short story collections are largely appropriate, including the truly essential 'Hills Like White Elephants' and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place'. However, I would dispute the omission of 'The Capital of the World', 'After the Storm', 'A Day's Wait' and 'Up in Michigan'.

There's also nothing of Hemingway's journalism in The Essential Hemingway. Many will consider this a hill not worth dying on, but like El Sordo on the hilltop I want to make a decent go of it. Some of Hemingway's long-form Esquire pieces from the 1930s are exceptional, including the anti-war message of 'Notes on the Next War', the big-game hunting piece 'Notes on Dangerous Game' and 'Monologue to the Maestro', in which Hemingway dispenses essential advice to writers. (As a sidebar, one would have thought that the passages from Death in the Afternoon where Hemingway outlines his famous 'iceberg theory' of writing should also be considered essential, but they are not included.) These journalistic pieces are already collected in the anthology By-Line, but if The Essential Hemingway was truly essential and comprehensive, it would include them, and perhaps also pieces from By-Line such as 'The Christmas Gift', where Hemingway recounts his two near-fatal plane crashes in Africa, and his often-overlooked dispatches from World War Two for Collier's magazine.

Nevertheless, despite these criticisms and the lack of update to the original 1947 version of The Essential Hemingway, the book remains a marvel. It is, after all, Ernest Hemingway, and while I may dispute some of the selections and omissions, it's never a bad thing to return to the writing of one who ranks among the very best of all time. His was a talent and a vitality that breathed into everything he wrote, so that even in a minor or inessential story you feel it fill your lungs and it feels as good as oxygen always feels. Hemingway's sentences are so well-crafted that they just rest well on the page and in your eyes – particularly, for some reason, in these Arrow editions – but Hemingway was more than a stylist, or a man of action. He was a writer of multitudes, and you can read anything by him and get a good impression of the wider whole which he represented. He embodied greatly the 'iceberg theory' he patented; he believed, and proved by his example, that "any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly" (pg. 506). The Essential Hemingway proves, ironically as much by its omissions as its selections, that this proponent of the 'theory of omission' was a truly special writer.

[Jed Richardson]

After having finished this, I don't actually think it is a good introduction to his work if I'm honest. The fact that it concludes on an epilogue to one of his longer books portrays this acutely.

I think that his prose requires longer formatting. Given a lot of his stories tend to go nowhere in terms of plot, I only find myself interested when he is really given the space to flesh out the world and the thoughts and characteristics of the character. With his really short stuff, I just found myself continuously let down if that makes sense; like I was constantly on the precipice of getting invested, only to have the rug swept out from under me. That's why I guess I enjoyed the whole ongoing saga of Nick, above all the other short stories I suppose.

There's still something to be said about putting a lot of his stuff in one place though. If I was curating a Hemingway collection, I probably would take out the novel excerpts and chuck in 'The Old Man And The Sea' for good measure.

When I come to back him next, I think I'd like to give 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' a crack.

[Pol]

Fiesta: The Sun also Rises (5/7/2018)
I struggle to find evidence of Hemingway's vaunted 'telegraphic' style. Instead I find a master of 'show, don't tell'. One sees the ennui all right. The repetitiveness, the mindless drinking, the Godot like meandering conversation (it feels like almost nothing happens in this novella) – very emblematic. 4 stars for that.

The edition (9/7/2018)
I was mildly miffed to find that I'd essentially purchased an anthology that hasn't been updated for 71 years as of time of writing several decades. Which explains the curious absence of Old Man and the Sea. Just about time to issue a new edition with an introduction or something really.

[Miles Isham · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice intoduction to Hemingway and I pretty much enjoyed it all. The casual anti-semitism in Sun Also Rises (and racism throughout) is hard to take but accurately reflects the attitudes at the time I am sure. Some of the short stories especially are very powerful and moving but everything is infused with a core of honest toughness that carries you along. The rich people are insufferable, of course, but Hemingway's contempt for them, even when it's his main characters, gives the stories their heart.

[Margaret Small · Rating 2 out of 5]

A major writer, I know, but.... I read 'Fiesta', an aimless novel in which the main characters drink a great deal and generally are rude to each other. There are bullfights too. Read the next one, a chapter from another novel in which an ambulance driver inWWI was on the run. Gave it up then.

[Pete Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to the master of the short sentence. One of the finest American writers of the 20th Century. Hemingway should be on everyone's book shelf.

[April Hottinger]

If you have never had the chance to read Hemingway this is the perfect book for you. The selection of readings are the perfect introductions to his works and have inspired me to read more.

[José Mariano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dejando un poco de lado la novela "Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises)" y los extractos de tres novelas más, el volumen presenta una icónica selección de las piezas cortas del escritor norteamericano. 23 relatos que, si se conoce algo de la biografía de Hemingway, adquiere un sabor cercano al placer vouyerista, en la medida que es justamente en este género dónde el autor usa a la ficción para gritar sus declaraciones de principios más reales. La vida con su padre médico que atendía a varios miembros de las comunidades indígenas norteamericanas, rupturas amorosas en las que el hombre destroza para no ser destrozado, personajes débiles o prisioneros de sus esposas (en la óptica de Hemingway) que no son otros que Francis Scott Fitgerald o John Dos Passos, la tortuosa relación con la ansiedad y el servicio que el alcohol le brinda a ratos a un escritor que terminaría suicidándose por prolongar esa peligrosa dupla, un continuo desfile de "flappers", de maridos casi impotentes que permiten que su esposa tenga relaciones lesbianas, y cazadores en un periodo histórico en el que la corrección política era impensable.
Con sus relatos breves, atestiguamos la mutación del estilo de Ernest Hemingway. Muy apegado a los llamados locos años veinte (e inevitablemente a Fitzgerald) en un principio, hasta ser dueño de una voz propia que se deja encandilar por el riesgo y que, sin duda, lo eleva a estados míticos (e inevitablemente ficticios). Los personajes del escritor norteamericanos siempre terminan siendo el héroe duro que utiliza la sensibilidad solo para analizar con despiadada pluma a terceros. El continuo eco del escritor en sus personajes, nos recuerda una y otra vez el concepto que Hemingway tenía de sí mismo. La prosa es prácticamente perfecta y se convierte en un reto ineludible para aquel que quiera aventurarse en esas corrientes muy breves pero terriblemente caudalosas.

[Steve Higgins · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book consists of one complete novel, Fiesta, parts of some other novels and a collection of short stories. I wasn’t in the least interested in reading parts of a book. If I want to read a book, I’ll read the whole lot, not parts of it so I thought I'd get cracking with Fiesta. Now I know Hemingway has a sort of minimalistic style so I was prepared for that. I just couldn’t understand the point of a lot of what he was talking about. It’s like he was showing us stuff that was hardly relevant, almost like a Quentin Tarantino film. There are pages of dialogue and then some fairly introspective stuff and then we were back to dialogue again. Jake Barnes is in love with Brett who I thought at first was a man but is actually a woman, a lady in fact, an actual lady, Lady Ashley, known as Brett to her friends. Jake and Brett and various others all go off from Paris to Spain to see the bull fighting in Pamplona and Brett turns out to be popular with many of the men. Jake is love with her and Michael wants to marry her but she decides she wants a bull fighter who then falls for her and apparently also wants to marry her.
Sorry Ernest if you are reading this from the spirit world but I got a little bit lost and only continued to the end out of a sort of dedication to not having another novel on my conscience that I couldn’t finish. What can I say? I know it’s a classic but sorry, it wasn’t my cup of tea. I tried some of the other short stories in this collection but again even though they are well written I started wondering things like 'what's this about? Why are we talking about this? What was the point of that?
Verdict: Interesting but an ultimately disappointing read.

[Joseph N · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marked READ for the following stories (in order of preference):
1. The Snows of Kilimanjaro
2. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
3. Indian Camp
4. The End of Something
5. The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife

Although this is only a fraction of the stories within this collection, I will not be returning to Hemingway’s short stories for a little while and I would like to review the ones I have read whilst they are recent in my mind.

I am well-accustomed to Hemingway’s writing by now, but in his best short stories one witnesses his style at its sharpest, most lucid and most painful. A deeply troubled life, full of pathos and discontent, comes through in these stories, particularly in my favourite. His most beautiful condensed passages are also found here. The weaker stories focus too much on technical details for my preference, and are perhaps a little shallow. A hit-and-miss writer, but when he hits he hits hard.

[Devina · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read Fiesta, then tried to give another short story within this collection a chance despite my misgivings but to no avail. I appreciate he's known as a prolific writer, but what I read was not my cup of tea. I found this review while trying to work out whether I was an outlier or not in thinking this way, and it perfectly describes the abject aimlessness and boring qualities of Fiesta/The Sun Also Rises. I genuinely don't think I can force myself to read another Hemingway again; there's many books to read in my life and less time than I'd like to read them so I'd rather focus on other books, rather than authors that made me regret starting a story in the first place. I literally only finished this because it's a book club read.

[Katelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Hemingway. I had already read most of the stories collected in this small anthology, "Fiesta, The Sun Also Rises" as well as most of the short stories and the chapter from "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "A Farewell to Arms". Still it was great to reread! I appreciated the chapter from the last two novels I mentioned because it's been about 6-7 years since I read them. It's been 2 years since I read "The Sun Also Rises" but I loved it just the same. I love his style; it's very comforting in these dark times with the corona virus. I needed something to take me away.

I can't believe some of the bad reviews on goodreads for Hemingway! I guess lots of people have no clue what they're getting into when they choose Hemingway for the first time. I don't care, I love him.

[Marian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like Hemingways style.
As a native German speaker with C1 English, it was possible to read it without using a dictionary.

Things that I like about the stories:
- He knows how to produce thrill/ excitement.
- It covers absolut existential experiences in wars/bullfights/hunts
- It is honest, bold and therefore sometimes brutal
- It deals with topics like confidence in oneself and finding it in extreme experiences

All in all very good. I am looking forward to read his novels as a whole now.

[Paul Reidy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've reread the short stories from this again. They are famously brilliant. There's a weary knowingness of a world that's too much, that Hemingway and his characters have searched for and then been disappointed about. Nick Adams going mad, Harry dying in Africa with a woman he doesn't love.

[Fred Whitehead · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this was a chore to get through tbh but then some of the short stories were brilliant and completely won me back. I struggled to get behind the bits when it’s all very chapish but I do love the style of Hemingway’s writing