Hemingway On Hunting

Ernest Hemingway’s lifelong zeal for hunting is reflected in his masterful works of fiction, from his famous account of an African safari in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” to passages about duck hunting in Across the River and into the Trees. For Hemingway, hunting was more than just a passion; it was a means through which to explore our humanity and man’s relationship to nature. Courage, awe, respect, precision, patience—these were the virtues that Hemingway honored in the hunter, and his ability to translate these qualities into prose has produced some of the strongest accounts of hunting of all time. Hemingway on Hunting offers the full range of Hemingway’s writing about the hunting life. With selections from his best-loved novels and stories, along with journalistic pieces from such magazines as Esquire and Vogue, this spectacular collection is a must-have for anyone who has ever tasted the thrill of the hunt—in person or on the page.

The literary icon’s niece connects with her past to “carry the Hemingway traditions of hunting, family, and storytelling into the new millennium” (Kirkus Reviews). Fifteen years after her father’s death, Hilary Hemingway receives a curious inheritance: an audio cassette of Les, her father, telling outrageous stories about hunting with his famous older brother, Ernest Hemingway. Les clearly aims to amuse the listeners with tales of the Hemingway brothers hunting vicious ostriches, hungry crocodiles, and deadly komodo dragons, but where Les Hemingway gets serious is in defending and explaining his brother’s reputation to a contemptuous Hemingway scholar. Hilary transcribes these stories, revealing the bond between two larger-than-life brothers—and tells of her own quest to make peace with the painful parts of the Hemingway legacy.

Green Hills of Africa is a work of nonfiction by American writer Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's second work of nonfiction, Green Hills of Africa is an account of a month on safari he and his wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, took in East Africa during December 1933. Much of the narrative describes Hemingway's adventures hunting in East Africa, interspersed with ruminations about literature and authors. Generally the East African landscape Hemingway describes is in the region of Lake Manyara in Tanzania.

From childhood on, Ernest Hemingway was a passionate fisherman. He fished the lakes and creeks near the family’s summer home at Walloon Lake, Michigan, and his first stories and pieces of journalism were often about his favorite sport. Here, collected for the first time in one volume, are all of his great writings about the many kinds of fishing he did—from angling for trout in the rivers of northern Michigan to fishing for marlin in the Gulf Stream. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway speaks of sitting in a café in Paris and writing about what he knew best—and when it came time to stop, he “did not want to leave the river.” The story was the unforgettable classic “Big Two-Hearted River,” and from its first words we do not want to leave the river either. He also wrote articles for The Toronto Star on fishing in Canada and Europe and, later, articles for Esquire about his growing passion for big-game fishing. Two of his last books, The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream, celebrate his vast knowledge of the ocean and his affection for its great denizens. Hemingway on Fishing is an encompassing, diverse, and fascinating assemblage. From the early Nick Adams stories and the memorable chapters on fishing the Irati River in The Sun Also Rises to such late novels as Islands in the Stream, this collection traces the evolution of a great writer’s passion, the range of his interests, and the sure use he made of fishing, transforming it into the stuff of great literature. Anglers and lovers of great writing alike will welcome this important collection.

Ernest Hemingway is a mythic writer and alpha male. As a hunter and conservationist, he drew greatly from the strong example of Theodore Roosevelt, and he much enjoyed teaching newcomers to shoot and hunt. Including short excerpts from Hemingway's works, these stories of his guns and rifles tell us as much about him as a lifelong, expert hunter and shooter and as a man.

Ondaatje follows the trail of Hemingway's two major African safaris and analyzes Hemingway's writings to uncover a startling amount of new material on this vitally important aspect of his life and work. Includes lavish illustrations.

From the summer of 1942 until the end of 1943, Ernest Hemingway spent much of his time patrolling the Gulf Stream and the waters off Cuba’s north shore in his fishing boat, Pilar. He was looking for German submarines. These patrols were sanctioned and managed by the US Navy and were a small but useful part of anti-submarine warfare at a time when U boat attacks against merchant shipping in the Gulf and the Caribbean were taking horrific tolls. While almost no attention has been paid to these patrols, other than casual mention in biographies, they were a useful military contribution as well as a central event (to Hemingway) around which important historical, literary, and biographical themes revolve.

A study of surprising similarities in their lives and works “adds an important element to the existing discussion” of two twentieth-century literary icons (Studies in American Humor). In this original comparative study of Kurt Vonnegut and Ernest Hemingway, Lawrence R. Broer maps the striking intersections of biography and artistry in works by both writers, and compares the ways they blend life and art. Broer views Hemingway as the “secret sharer” of Vonnegut’s literary imagination and argues that the two writers—traditionally considered as adversaries because of Vonnegut’s rejection of Hemingway’s emblematic hypermasculinism—inevitably address similar deterministic wounds in their fiction: childhood traumas, family insanity, deforming wartime experiences, and depression. Rooting his discussion in these psychological commonalities, Broer traces their personal and artistic paths by pairing sets of works and protagonists in ways that show the two writers not only addressing similar concerns, but developing a response that in the end establishes an underlying kinship when it comes to the fate of the American hero of the twentieth century. Hemingway provided frequent fodder for Vonnegut, inspiring a cadre of characters who celebrate war and death. In his sardonic response to this vision of a Hemingwayesque world, Vonnegut espoused kindness and restraint as moral imperatives against the more violent yearnings of human nature, which Hemingway in turn embraced as stoic, virile, and heroic. Though their paths were radically different, Broer finds in both an overarching obsession with the scars of war as chief adversary in a personal quest for understanding and wholeness. He locates in each writer’s canon moments of spiritual awaking leading to literary evolution—if not outright reinvention. In their later works Broer detects an increasing recognition of redemptive feminine aspects in themselves and their protagonists, pulling against the destructively tragic fatalism that otherwise dominates their worldviews. Broer sees Vonnegut and Hemingway as fundamentally at war—with themselves, with one another’s artistic visions, and with the idea of war itself. Against this onslaught, he asserts, they wrote as a mode of therapy and achieved literary greatness through combative opposition to the shadows that loomed so large around them.