Green Hills of Africa

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice, Across the River and into the Trees stands as Hemingway’s statement of defiance in response to the great dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War. Hemingway’s last full-length novel published in his lifetime, it moved John O’Hara in The New York Times Book Review to call him ‘the most important author since Shakespeare.’

Ernest Hemingway’s first new book of fiction, since the publication of A Farewell to Arms, contains fourteen stories of varying length. Some of them have appeared in magazines but the majority have not been published before. The characters and backgrounds are widely varied. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is about an old Spanish Beggar. “Homage to Switzerland” concerns various conversations at a Swiss railway-station restaurant. “The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio” is laid in the accident ward of a hospital in Western United States, and so on. Ernest Hemingway made his literary start as a short-story writer. He has always excelled in that medium, and this volume reveals him at his best.

Representing some of Hemingway’s most important and compelling early writing. In these 14 stories, Hemingway begins to examine the themes that would occupy his later works: the casualties of war, the often uneasy relationship between men and women, sport and sportsmanship. In , Hemingway offers a lasting tribute to the famed matador Maera. tells of an Italian major recovering from war wounds as he mourns the untimely death of his wife. is the hard-edged story about two Chicago gunmen and their potential victim. Nick Adams makes an appearance in , in which he is presumably betrayed by his Indian girlfriend, Prudence. And is a young couple’s subtle, heartwrenching discussion of abortion. Pared down, gritty, and subtly expressive, these stories show the young Hemingway emerging as America’s finest short story writer.

The greatest American novel to emerge from World War I, cemented Ernest Hemingway’s reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. Drawn largely from Hemingway’s own experiences, it is the story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front, the beautiful British nurse with whom he falls in love, and their journey to find some small sanctuary in a world gone mad with war. By turns beautiful and tragic, tender and harshly realistic, is one of the supreme literary achievements of our time.

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” .

The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his suberb account of El Sordo’s last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in and to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving and wise.

“If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote to Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.