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Authors
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
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There is no collected edition of Hemingway’s writings. In addition to works mentioned in the author’s headnote, his fiction includes Today Is Friday (1926) and God Rest You Merry Gentlemen (1933). His tribute to Spain, The Spanish Earth, and his play The Fifth Column appeared in 1938, the latter in a collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories. His journalism has been collected in The Wild Years (1962), edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan, and By- Line: Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades (1967), edited by William White. His Complete Poems (1992) has been edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis. Audre Hanneman’s Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive Bibliography (1967) is thorough. Scribners published The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987). The authorized biography is Carlos Baker’s Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (1969). Jeffrey Meyers’s Hemingway: A Biography (1985) and Kenneth S. Lynn’s Hemingway (1987) are important. Michael Reynolds’s detailed volumes include The Young Hemingway (1986), Hemingway: The Paris Years (1989), Hemingway: The 1930s (1997), and Hemingway: The Final Years (1999). The Hemingway Women (1983), by Bernice Kert, tells about Hemingway’s mother, wives, and lovers; Fame Became of Him: Hemingway as Public Writer (1984), by John Raeburn, compares the life with the public image. A Reader’s Guide to Ernest Hemingway (1972), by Arthur Waldhorn, and A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1989), by Paul Smith, are useful handbooks; Peter B. Messent’s Ernest Hemingway (1992) is a good overview. For collections of critical essays on Hemingway, see Ernest Hemingway: Seven Decades of Criticism (2001), edited by Linda Wagner-Martin; New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1991), edited by Jackson J. Benson; The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway (1996), edited by Scott Donaldson; and A Historical Guide to Ernest Hemingway (2001), edited by Wagner-Martin. Specialized studies include Bernard Oldsey’s Hemingway’s Hidden Craft: The Writing of “A Farewell to Arms” (1979), Wirt Williams’s The Tragic Art of Ernest Hemingway (1982), and Mark Spilka’s Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny (1990).
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and spent childhood summers at his family's cottage in northern Michigan, a setting that later appeared in many of his works. During World War I, he served as an ambulance driver in Europe but was hit by shrapnel within the first month of service and sent home. He moved to Paris in 1920, and partly supported by his journalism, partly supported by his wife's money, he attempted to become a writer. Fitzgerald and Anderson helped him get his short-story collection, In Our Time, published in 1925. The next year he achieved instant celebrity with the publication of The Sun Also Rises, a novel written with his characteristically short, streamlined sentences and sparse language. Hemingway's works are known for their almost primitive masculinity, featuring such competitive displays as hunting, bullfighting, and deep-water fishing. His many novels include A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, but a head wound sustained in a plane crash made his last years painful and increasingly desperate. He killed himself in 1961.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) reveals all the qualities which made Hemingway an influential and controversial artist. For decades, younger writers have responded to his taut, minimalist prose and stoic values. However, there has been plenty of debate about his portrayals of women, his self-isolated macho protagonists, and the issue of whether his austere style conveys more or less than meets the eye. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is part adventure story, part personal memoir, and part meditation on the modern condition.
1. As The Snows of Kilimanjaro begins, Harry is lying wounded, possibly dying of gangrene. Does his condition take on symbolic significance as the story progresses? Describe how this happens.
2. Read over some of the conversations between Harry and his wife as they wait for a plane to evacuate him from the camp. They try to avoid quarreling, but repeatedly drift into it. What causes them to do so?
3. The story includes italicized reminiscences -- Harry thinking back over experiences in Europe during and after World War I. Is there a common theme to these reminiscences? Do they suggest times when his life had more meaning? Less? Does Harry achieve some kind of overview of his life, and what it has meant, before he dies?
