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Where to start with...

Where to start reading Ernest Hemingway’s books

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Features

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Reading lists

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Green Hills of Africa

A fine book on death in the African afternoon. . .The writing is the thing; that way he has of getting down with beautiful precision the exact way things look, smell, taste, feel, sound

If he were never to write again, his name would live as long as the English language, for Green Hills of Africa takes its place beside his other works on that small shelf in our libraries which we reserve for the classics

This book is an expression of a deep enjoyment and appreciation of being alive - in Africa. There is more to it than hunting; it is the feeling of the dew on the grass in the morning, the shape and colour and smell of the country, the companionship of friends ... and the feeling that time has ceased to matter

Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

This is Hemingway's East African safari journal. 
 
'All I wanted to do was get back to Africa' 
 
Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man. 
 
'In a class by itself - the country at all hours shines bright and clear in these pages' Daily Telegraph 
 
'The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere' New York Times

Across the River and into the Trees

A poignant story of the inability to capture lost youth, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of A Farewell to Arms. 
 
'Luck is a feast which doesn't stay in one place' 
 
Richard Cantrell is an American colonel living in Venice just after the Second World War. The fighting has left him scarred and embittered, a middle-aged man with a heart condition. It seems that only the love of Renata, a nineteen-year-old countess can save him. But Cantrell is living in the shadow of war, every move he makes dictated by old battle instincts, and it is possible that for him the longed-for peace may have come too late. 
 
'The most important author since Shakespeare' New York Times

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

'Stamped with the urgency of Hemingway's style - revealing tenderness of feeling beneath descriptions of brutality'

In a class by itself - the country, at all hours shines bright and clear in these pages

Hemingway's early stories told in his distinctive style. 
 
'When she goes, he though. I'll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is' 
 
In these early Hemingway stories, which are partly autobiographical, men and women of passion live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. They range from haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, to brutal America with its deceptive calm, and war-ravaged Europe 
 
'An excellent story-teller, intense and skilful in planning and bringing off his effects' Daily Telegraph

Islands in the Stream

Hemingway's last major novel, set in the Gulf Stream islands, captures the struggles of adult personal relationships in his consummate distinctive style. 
 
'He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane' 
 
This is the last book Hemingway wrote before he died, the story of Thomas Hudson, an artist and adventurer. Living a bachelor's life on an island in the Gulf Stream during the thirties, Hudson's existence is dictated by the waves and tides. But when his sons come to visit, Hudson must grapple with the role of father and the unfamiliar demands of family. 
 
A late work by one of America's greatest writers. 
 
'Hemingway's most deeply autobiographical piece of work' Irish Times

To Have and Have Not

Ernest Hemingway's adventure novel set on the verge of the tropics. 
 
'Listen,' I told him. 'Don't be so tough so early in the morning. I'm sure you've cut plenty of people's throats. I haven't even had my coffee yet.' 
 
Harry Morgan is a tough guy making his living during the Depression from his motor boat in Key West, Florida. Although he normally takes out fishing parties, sometimes his boat can be put to other uses. If the money offered is worth his while, Harry will run guns, rum and men to and from Cuba. But he is playing a dicey game. Hemingway's hardest hero risks not just his living, but his life. 
 
'Absorbing and moving. It opens with a fusillade of bullets, reaches its climax with another, and sustains a high pitch of excitement throughout' Times Literary Supplement

The Sun Also Rises

Fiesta

Some of the finest and most restrained writing that this generation has produced

Hemingway captures atmosphere by reticence and breathes life into his characters by pages left unsaid... It is American; it is literature; and it is a first novel by a genius

It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame . . . This novel is unquestionably one of the events of an unusually rich year in literature

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb. 
 
 In 1917, Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendships with such fellow-American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style. 
 
 Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books; Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms. 
 
 He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and described his experiences in the bestseller, For Whom the Bell Tolls. 
 
 His direct and deceptively simple style of writing spawned generations of imitators but no equals. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

'This is a hell of dull talk...How about some of that champagne?' 
 
Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change. When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the Bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman that he loves. 
 
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway's great novel of the Spanish Civil War 
 
High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dynamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco's rebels... 
 
'One of the greatest novels which our troubled age will produce' Observer 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 
 
This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls

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