This long-awaited Library of America edition brings together for the first time in one volume the now legendary writings from Ernest Hemingway’s breakthrough years in Paris. Featuring newly edited texts and several previously uncollected writings, it reveals as never before the astonishing artistic evolution that led the young journalist and expatriate author to transform the short story and the novel and to perfect the famous prose style that has influenced writers ever since. In his work for the Toronto Star and Hearst’s International News Service, Hemingway began to hone his gift for concise description. That journalism is represented here by a selection of thirty-one articles from 1920 to 1923, some never before republished, on subjects ranging from trout fishing to the rise of fascism in Italy. Hemingway’s exploration of new modes of storytelling is on display in two early stories, “A Divine Gesture” (1922) and “Up in Michigan” (1923)—the former reprinted here for the first time since its original publication—and in the rare Three Mountains Press edition of in our time (1924), a haunting series of vignettes of violence and alienation now recognized as a landmark of literary modernism. At the center of this volume are Hemingway’s first three full-length works—the story collection In Our Time (1925), the scathing satirical novel The Torrents of Spring (1926), and his masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises (1926). All are presented in corrected texts newly edited by Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon. In Our Time introduces Hemingway’s alter ego, Nick Adams, and a wide range of characters, many drawn from life. “The End of Something,” “Soldier’s Home,” “Cat in the Rain,” “Big Two-Hearted River,” and the other celebrated stories in the collection retain their extraordinary vividness and an unsettling ability to make their spare economy of language bear the weight of all that is left unsaid. Set apart in Hemingway’s work by its tone of high-spirited nonsense, The Torrents of Spring, written in just ten days, is a bridge-burning parody of work by his mentors Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. In The Sun Also Rises, based on his experiences in Paris and Spain, Hemingway solidified his role as the preeminent literary voice of the Lost Generation. This new text corrects numerous errors, restores key changes made to Hemingway’s original punctuation, and reinstates references to real people removed by his editor for fear of libel. Rounding out the volume is a generous selection of letters to a brilliant array of correspondents, including Anderson, Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Sylvia Beach, Edmund Wilson, and Maxwell Perkins. A newly researched chronology and detailed notes offer vital context for understanding Hemingway’s many allusions to persons and events.
Author
Terse literary style of Ernest Miller Hemingway, an American writer, ambulance driver of World War I, journalist, and expatriate in Paris during the 1920s, marks short stories and novels, such as The Sun Also Rises (1926) and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which concern courageous, lonely characters, and he won the Nobel Prize of 1954 for literature. Economical and understated style of Hemingway strongly influenced 20th-century fiction, whereas his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s. He published seven novels, six short story collections and two nonfiction works. Survivors published posthumously three novels, four collections of short stories, and three nonfiction works. People consider many of these classics. After high school, Hemingway reported for a few months for the Kansas City Star before leaving for the Italian front to enlist. In 1918, someone seriously wounded him, who returned home. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms . In 1922, he married Hadley Richardson, the first of his four wives. The couple moved, and he worked as a foreign correspondent and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the expatriate community of the "lost generation" of 1920s. After his divorce of 1927 from Hadley Richardson, Hemingway married Pauline Pfeiffer. At the Spanish civil war, he acted as a journalist; afterward, they divorced, and he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls . Hemingway maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, and Cuba during the 1930s and 1940s. Martha Gellhorn served as third wife of Hemingway in 1940. When he met Mary Welsh in London during World War II, they separated; he presently witnessed at the Normandy landings and liberation of Paris. Shortly after 1952, Hemingway went on safari to Africa, where two plane crashes almost killed him and left him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. Nevertheless, in 1959, he moved from Cuba to Ketchum, Idaho, where he committed suicide in the summer of 1961.
