Image: Victoria Ford/Penguin
A Nobel literature laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, pugilist, decorated war hero, adventurer, heavy drinker, and cat lover, American writer Ernest Hemingway was a complex man who left his mark on the literary world. His no-frills prose and incisive point of view cemented him as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century – if not all time.
Spanning decades and continents, Hemingway’s writing encompasses a whole host of genres, from short stories to non-fiction to sweeping novels, many of them informed by his own life experiences and penchant for traditionally macho sports like big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing and bullfighting. We've distilled the best selection to get you started on his extensive body of work.
Where better place to start than the short story that saw Hemingway scoop the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize? Set along the coast of Cuba, The Old Man and the Sea is a tale of an old fisherman hell-bent on breaking his unlucky streak, his loyal apprentice, a giant fish and a battle against the unforgiving elements (including sharks). A many-layered story imbued with symbolism, it is primarily a stark yet tender depiction of the tumultuous, dangerous and physically demanding world of fishing – relayed through Hemingway's trademark narrative style and deceptively simple prose.
When Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant, and Catherine Barkley, a recently widowed English nurse, cross paths, they begin a slow-burn – but ultimately passionate – affair that is inextricably entwined with the chaos, pain and immense loss of the ongoing First World War. As much a great love story as a story about the Great War, A Farewell to Arms draws heavily from Hemingway's own experiences as a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy in 1918, where he fell in love with a Red Cross nurse.
Fiesta , known alternatively as The Sun Also Rises Fiesta captures the hedonism, apathy and itinerancy that characterised the American expatriate circuit in post-World War I Europe.
Tasked with the dangerous mission of blowing up a strategically important bridge behind fascist enemy lines in the Spanish Civil War, volunteer American soldier Robert Jordan joins a band of fellow Republican guerrilla fighters as, together, they travel through the mountains of the Spanish Sierra. Inspired by Hemingway's own time covering the Spanish Civil War as a journalist in 1937, For Whom the Bell Tolls is an epic, heartfelt story about a fascinating yet brutal and bloody chapter in Spain's history.
In addition to novels and short stories, Hemingway's oeuvre included clear-eyed and observant non-fiction about his travels and interests. Death in the Afternoon is a standout among them, at once a painstakingly catalogued deep-dive into the intense, heady world of bullfighting and a lyrical travelogue that paints an extraordinary picture of Spain's culture and landscape. Fans of Death in the Afternoon (or literary cocktails) may also be interested to know that Hemingway invented a drink of the same name: a rather potent combination of absinthe and champagne.
A Moveable Feast F. Scott Fitzgerald , Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
Many of the short stories in The Snows of Kilimanjaro are tales of adventure spanning Africa, Europe and America, but also vignettes of passion, intensity and tragedy: a couple stranded on safari due to a nasty case of gangrene; the drunken musings of a down-and-out bullfighter; and an American World War I veteran struggling to adjust to life back home. The collection also features our first introduction to Nick Adams, a recurring character in two dozen short stories by Hemingway whose coming of age and initiation into new cultures and experiences loosely mirrors the author’s own life.
In this collection of short stories, Hemingway imagines a world largely devoid of women's influence, where characters embody – and live out – a kind of undiluted masculinity. While many of the stories and characters are defined by typically macho realms like bullfighting, boxing, and shady gangsterdom, Men Without Women also touches on deeper themes like love, infidelity, mortality, and the fraught relationship between the sexes. In Hills Like White Elephants , he beautifully draws a vignette of a terse – and euphemistic – conversation between a couple as they wait for a train to Madrid.
