Hemingway’s first book published in the United States, In Our Time (1925), was a collection of stories (like “Indian Camp” and “Big Two-Hearted River”) linked by the character of Nick Adams, who appears in many of them; by the short vignettes between the stories that tell a story of their own; by the theme of behavior in the face of life-threatening violence; and by the now-famous Hemingway style. The book was acclaimed upon its publication, and it remains a classic.
The Torrents of Spring, a novella that attempts in a rather belabored fashion to satirize the work of the American writer Sherwood Anderson, followed in 1926, as did The Sun Also Rises, a novel about expatriate life in Paris and Spain after World War I. In both subject and style, the latter book is a genuinely radical work of Modern art. (The specifics of its central conflict are never explicitly stated, for instance.) The Sun Also Rises is probably the most-admired of all Hemingway’s books. Men Without Women (1927) comprises stories of bullfighters and boxers, including “The Undefeated,” “The Killers,” and “Fifty Grand.” Men Without Women also contains “Hills Like White Elephants,” a story told almost entirely in dialogue.
Published in 1929, A Farewell to Arms toned down Hemingway’s revolutionary style to yield a more conventional—and a more moving—book than he had produced up to that time; the result was the novel’s widespread popular success as well as worldwide fame for Hemingway himself. The story collection Winner Take Nothing followed in 1933. Less consistently satisfying than the two collections that preceded it, Winner Take Nothing nevertheless contained more formal experimentation, like the verbatim foreign dialogue in “Wine of Wyoming.”
At this point in his career, Hemingway seems to have become distracted by his own celebrity. Eight years passed between A Farewell to Arms and his next novel, the slight and poorly-received To Have and Have Not (1937), which is really a collection of linked short stories that share a setting (Cuba and Key West, where Hemingway bought houses) rather than a true novel. In the interim, Hemingway wrote two books of nonfiction: a loose, baggy treatise on bullfighting called Death in the Afternoon (1932) and The Green Hills of Africa (1935), which was about big-game hunting. All the while, the Hemingway legend was growing—thanks in no small part to the author’s own embellishments (and sometimes out-and-out lies) about his past. For instance, Hemingway claimed to have fought in the Italian infantry during World War I when he did no such thing.
Finally, in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls appeared. The book is a big novel about the Spanish Civil War, which Hemingway had covered as a correspondent and documentary filmmaker. Critics accused it, and him, of self-parody—and indeed, the novel’s style is often unbearably mannered. Still, the best-selling For Whom the Bell Tolls stands among the early stories and his first two novels as Hemingway’s main storytelling achievements.
During World War II, Hemingway occupied himself by reporting from Europe. He also hunted German submarines in the Caribbean from the deck of his fishing boat, the Pilar. In 1950, he finally 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 that 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 the executors of his estate 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 the Caribbean setting of To Have and Have Not. The Garden of Eden (1986), about a ménage à 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 Hemingway’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.
