BIOGRAPHY
Hemingway: The Complete Arc
10 books
One writer, start to finish, because Hemingway is worth reading as a single arc rather than a handful of assigned classics. It runs from the early Paris stories through the great novels — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls — out to the bullfighting and the African hunting and back to the spare, perfect Old Man and the Sea. A Moveable Feast, written last and looking back at the beginning, is where to understand the man. Read in order and you watch a style get invented, perfected, parodied by its own creator, and then, once, transcended. Start with the short stories, then The Sun Also Rises. Everything else follows from those two.
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The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
Already on the Manly Tears list and it belongs here as fully as anywhere. An old Cuban fisherman goes out alone and hooks the greatest fish of his life — a massive marlin that pulls his small skiff far out into the Gulf Stream for three days. Hemingway wrote it as his answer to the critics who said he was finished, and the sea in this novel — vast, indifferent, beautiful, and entirely without mercy — is the most fully realized body of water in American fiction. At under one hundred and thirty pages it is best read in a single sitting without interruption.
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The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
The novel that catapulted Hemingway to worldwide fame and success. The Sun Also Rises follows Jake Barnes and a group of ex-patriot friends through Spain and France, with plenty of wine-drinking and bull-fighting. The novel is a bit semi-autobiographical in that the main character is trying to deal with his war wounds — both physical and emotional — and escape to the supposed romanticism of traveling and eating and drinking to your heart’s content. Does Jake find happiness? You’ll have to read to find out.
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The Complete Short Stories
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's short fiction is where the voice was made: the Nick Adams stories in Michigan woods and trout streams, the bullfighting stories in Spain, the African hunting stories, and the late work that strips everything down to what two people are not saying to each other across a table. This complete collection covers the full career and is a different book from The Nick Adams Stories on the Hunting & Fishing list — that is a subset focused on formation and the outdoor world; this is the career retrospective including Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean Well-Lighted Place, and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. Around 650 pages. The single-author career retrospective entry on this list. The reader who has read Hemingway's novels and not his stories has read the lesser half of the work.
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Green Hills of Africa
Ernest Hemingway
I loved this country and I felt at home and where a man feels at home, outside of where he’s born, is where he’s meant to go. Over the course of his decades-long writing career, Hemingway penned a number of non-fiction works, most of them falling into the travel genre. Green Hills of Africa chronicles his 1933 big game hunting excursion with his wife and friends. They hunt, they rest under the shade of a tree, they drink around a campfire at night, and repeat in the morning. There were numerous times where I had the thought that this is basically a non-fiction version of The Sun Also Rises — a good thing, in my book. It reads like any Hemingway fiction does: it’s like a letter from an old friend — the prose, while not ornate, is thoughtful and real and meaningful in its terseness. Scattered among the hunting tales are Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and literature, on “pursuit as happiness,” and on the invigorating but sometimes infuriating nature of competition. Though the safari-driven text may make some modern readers squeamish, Hemingway’s ethic towards hunting is, perhaps surprisingly, well-thought-out. Overall, it’s a wonderful, virile book that’s as worthy of reading as anything Hemingway penned. Though Papa complained about the bugs and the wet heat and the sting of failure, he found satisfaction in those things and made them appealing enough for modern readers to yearn for those same hard-earned and, ultimately, fulfilling experiences.If you’re looking for another look at 1930s Africa, West With the Night by Beryl Markham — the first female aviator to cross the Atlantic east to west — is also very good.
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A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway
Published posthumously from an unfinished manuscript, A Moveable Feast invites readers to imagine what it might have become with the final touches by the master. Regardless, it's perfect in its own way as a memoir of Hemingway's early days in Paris. Again, you can read of Hemingway deep-sea fishing and hunting German U-Boats and stalking big game in Africa. But before all this, before Hemingway was Hemingway, he was a young man burning with desire and working on his craft. The book also acts as a time capsule for 1920s Paris, which, from Woody Allen to others, is imbued with its own magic. Are all the stories true? One can only guess. But if they are, F. Scott Fitzgerald showed Hemingway his hog in a restaurant bathroom.
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A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway's most emotionally direct novel, written shortly after his own wartime experience in Italy and his famously complicated feelings about the women he loved and lost there. Frederic Henry, an American ambulance officer in WWI Italy, falls in love with a British nurse named Catherine Barkley, and the novel follows their relationship across the slow catastrophe of the Italian front. Hemingway strips the prose down to almost nothing — no adjectives, no commentary, just what happened — and the restraint is what makes the ending so devastating. Hemingway reportedly rewrote the last page thirty-nine times.
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Death in the Afternoon
Ernest Hemingway
A book considered seminal in the history of bullfighting, Hemingway dives deep into its culture and roots, as well as his own firsthand experience. (Hint: Even for such a bold man, the writer is humbled when faced with the power of a young cow.) Running with the bulls in Pamplona is something many men desire in order to test their mettle, but this tome is fascinating as a kind of pet project for the author. Hemingway, as some may guess through some of his other works, revered and adored the bullfighting culture, and it responded by loving him back. Elevating it to both poetry and religion, he was given unfettered access to explain it for the first time in his own words, and as such, it belongs among some of the best sport-that-transcends-sports writing ever assembled.
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Three Stories and Ten Poems
Ernest Hemingway
An obscure book, and small, Poems represents one of the author's first triumphs. It was Hemingway's first published book, which had been his burning desire that sustained him through years of privation and practice. Its title is also indicative of his initial efforts: Hemingway would never again publish or write poetry, but in those heady days of youth, when anything was possible, he explored every possible direction. While the poetry itself may be forgettable, this small collection also includes several notable short stories, including the very fine (and often anthologized) "Up in Michigan." No man emerges without striving, and for this reason alone, Poems belongs on any ambitious man's bookshelf.
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By-Line: Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Those new to Hemingway might believe that he sprung fully formed onto the literary landscape, but the reality is that he hustled. Before he was a famed novelist, he was essentially a freelance writer, working on assignment for newspapers around the U.S. while often living abroad. But even with this seeming drudgery, Hemingway had that je ne sais quoi in his copy, and his editors and readers alike felt it. By-Line collects 77 of his nonfiction newspaper dispatches, and they have the same appeal as his fiction. Granted, this may be too in the weeds for some, but for any young man slogging his guts out for minimal pay and yet still fueled by a dream, this book gives courage and fortitude to stay the course.
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway
Robert Jordan is a young dynamiter in the Spanish Civil War. He’s an American who’s volunteered to fight against Franco’s fascists, and is sent behind enemy lines to take out an important bridge to impede enemy forces from advancing. He lives in a rudimentary camp with anti-fascist Spanish guerillas, and comes to embrace their hearty way of life and love. And of course, there are some incredible battle scenes, which were informed by Hemingway’s own time as a correspondent in the Spanish Civil War.