The Enduring Hemingway: An Anthology of a Lifetime In Literature

by Ernest Hemingway

Selections from Hemingway's writings provide insight into his concerns, personal philosophy, and literary occupations

Genres: Biography, Literature

864 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 1974

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

[Bradley Noell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fantastic collection of some of Hemingway's best short stories and sections of his novels that paint a good picture of the writer as a whole. The organization makes sense, placing his works together by the themes he was working with and the time in which he wrote them. As an introduction to Hemingway this is damn near perfect and for someone just looking for a dip back into his work, this is very nice.

The one thing that I did not care for was the sections of full length novels placed among the short stories. Maybe for someone just starting with the writer this would serve as encouragement to pick up one of the novels whose chapters are featured here, but as someone who's read all of the novels featured here, I found most of the sample chapters did not work. The writing is beautiful of course, and the preface that usually opens each new section serves to explain the thesis (of sorts) that the editors were going with when they organized this collection gives a good idea of what Hemingway was going for, you just do not get the full weight of the novels when you cut pieces out of them and place them among the short stories. The bits from A Movable Feast worked well because they feel like they are Hemingway speaking to us, but the other sections didn't really work, at least for me. The short stories bring the collection as a whole back, so this was still a wonderful read and I do recommend it to anyone who is interested in Hemingway's work or who just wants to see if he's for them.