The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 5, 1932-1934: 1932-1934

by Ernest Hemingway, Sandra Spanier (Editor), Miriam B. Mandel (Editor)

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 5, spanning 1932 through May 1934, traces the completion and publication of Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. During this intensely active period, Hemingway hunts in Arkansas and Wyoming, fishes the waters off Key West and Cuba, revisits Madrid and Paris, and undertakes a long-anticipated African safari. He witnesses transitions at home and abroad: the deepening Great Depression, Prohibition-era rumrunning, revolution in Cuba, and political unrest in Spain. His readership and celebrity continue to expand as he begins writing for the new men's magazine Esquire. As the volume ends, Hemingway has just acquired his beloved boat, Pilar. The letters detail these events as well as his relationships with his family, friends, publishers, critics and literary contemporaries including editor Maxwell Perkins, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Together the letters paint an intimate self-portrait of this multi-faceted, self-confident, energetic artist in his prime.

840 pages, Hardcover

Published June 30, 2020

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

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Volume 5 continues the same academic precision of the first four. An intimate view of Hemingway in his early 30s with and without his prejudices and personal, often petty, concerns. At times thin-skinned but always generous with his time and money. The actual content of volume five covered years of less interest to me in terms of Hemingway's life and creativity--hence the three stars.

[Florence ✨ · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A man can be a hell of a serious artist and not have to make his living by it…”