The Hemingway Reader

by Ernest Hemingway

1953 Charles Scribners Sons trade paperback, too early for ISBN. Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell To Arms;the Nick Adams Stories).A collection of the author's best-and shortest- work.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Short Stories, Literature

652 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1953

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

[T.J. Forrester · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, you know, it's Hemingway.

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good selection. The inclusion of the Torrents of Spring alone is dubious owing to its being so unlike everything else Hemingway wrote. Still, overcoming incredulity, I enjoyed its adolescent humor.

[Joseph Carrabis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a fascinating find. It has some complete novels, many complete short stories, and I find its true value in presenting a chronological demonstration of his work hence Hemingway's growth as a writer.
Reading his first published piece, I doubt he'd be published today. His journalism background overshadows everything else, as does a limited vocabulary and lack of skill. His first few pieces aren't much above "See Jane run. Run, Jane, run!" The Sun Also Rises begins to show some style, some fluidity of language, and it's not until well into his career - For Whom the Bell Tolls - that we see prepositions, use of voice, expression, the full quiver of author arrows. Somewhere in the book I encountered a paragraph that was "John was hungry. He opened a can of beans. The beans were good. He ate the beans. John liked being hungry, but he ate the beans and they were good."
By the time we get to The Old Man and the Sea we see Hemingway's full power at work. Simple, yes, and elegant. I think the maturing of his style traces the maturing readership of the US. At the start of his career, reaching the largest audience meant writing the simplest sentences possible. At the end of his career, education and readership had soared, as did his writing.

[Eugenia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has some short stories and some excerpts from some of Heminway's better known novels. I really enjoyed The Snows of Kilimanjaro and the excerpt from For Whom the Bell Tolls. I skipped some of the excerpts because I had already read the novel from which they came. In general I prefer his novels to the short stories here--and I prefer to read the whole novel rather than these excerpts.

[Dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's Hemingway...that's really all that needs to be said for many.
If you haven't read Hemingway as an adult, I urge you to do so. (Meaning if your only Hemingway experience was reading in school for book reports and the like, ug...try again as an adult reading for pleasure.) Maybe he was a drunk womanizer, maybe he was a scared mentally ill writer, likely he was all of the above...whatever the case, the man could tell a story.

~

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ancestral library volume. Read all or most of it over many youthful years. Now in lake-house library.

May 8, 2021: dipped into this at lake house and read the foreword and an excerpt from Across The River and Into The Trees — now pretty sure I have not read most of it, as written above. Will continue to review at lake house.

Started story “The Torrent of Spring” based on a comment in the foreword — didn’t like and quit.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the short stories and re-read "The Sun Also Rises". Didn't read the excerpts as I hope to read the full novels soon.

[Kevin Gallan · Rating 4 out of 5]

good story