During the Second World War, Hemingway occupied himself by reporting from Europe. In 1950, he published another book, the critically lambasted Across the River and Into the Trees. He recovered somewhat with The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a novella about a Cuban fisherman's struggle with a great marlin, which might be Hemingway's answer to Moby-Dick. His most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea was the last Ernest Hemingway book to be published before the author's suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. A Moveable Feast, his charming memoir of the years spent with other expatriates in Paris during the 1920s, appeared three years later.
Hemingway's fame, and the public's desire for more of his work, continues to be so formidable that his executors have brought out a number of books since his death that the writer himself had not considered fit for publication. Islands in the Stream (1970) reprises To Have and Have Not's Caribbean setting. The Garden of Eden (1986), about a menage a trois, dramatizes the author's fascination with androgyny hinted at in The Sun Also Rises and near the end of A Farewell to Arms, as well as in stories like "The Sea Change." The Complete Short Stories: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987) contains some of the author's unpublished short fiction. And 1999's True at First Light either reports on or imagines an affair between a Hemingway-like hero and an African girl.
