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 The Complete Short Stories: The Finca Vigia Edition (1987) contains some of Hemingway's unpublished short fiction.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.
