Product Description

THE ONLY COMPLETE COLLECTION BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR

In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, readers will delight in the author's most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection. For Hemingway fans The Complete Short Stories is an invaluable treasury.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3957 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 672 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The subtitle of this monumental collection refers to the home (Lookout Farm) that Hemingway owned in Cuba from 1939 to 1959. That time frame accounts for most of the short fiction, published and unpublished, that followed the major collection issued in 1938, The First Forty-Nine. There are 60 stories in all. Of the 21 not included in the 1938 collection, the seven heretofore unpublished pieces will interest readers most. Three are especially good. "A Train Trip" and "The Porter" are self-contained excerpts from an abandoned novel that match in tone and appeal the early Hemingway work in which he explored the adolescent sensibility exposed to an adult world that is exciting but at the same time threatening and morally complex. Drawing from the author's experiences in Europe during World War II, "Black Ass at the Crossroads" is excellent in its detailing of violent action, portraying an ambush of German soldiers from the point of view of an American infantry officer, depressed and angry over the suffering he has inflicted in the course of battle. The other previously unpublished pieces include a Spanish Civil War story reminiscent of Hemingway's play, The Fifth Column; two quite touching stories about a father's disappointments with a troubled son; and a long section comprising four chapters from an early version of the novel, Islands in the Stream. Intrinsically readable, the collection is also significant in drawing together much that was unavailable or difficult to access.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A thoughtfully arranged, comprehensive edition of Hemingway's short fiction justifies publication. This is not it. At best, it offers convenience rather than creativity or even completeness: it omits five stories published two years ago. It reprints the "the first 49" stories (1938), adds 14 subsequently published, and appends seven hitherto unpublished. What is lacking is a fresh reordering of the storiesthematic, chronological, or stylistic. Further, three of the unpublished pieces are not stories but excerpts from novels. None of the new material is artistically significant. Yet each bears the hallmark of Hemingway's geniuswhich will survive even this. Arthur Waldhorn, City Coll.,
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Publisher's Preface

There has long been a need for a complete and up-to-date edition of the shortstories of Ernest Hemingway. Until now the only such volume was the omnibuscollection of the first forty-nine stories published in 1938 together withHemingway's play The Fifth Column. That was a fertile period ofHemingway's writing and a number of stories based on his experiences in Cubaand Spain were appearing in magazines, but too late to have been included in"The First Forty-nine."

In 1939 Hemingway was already considering a new collection of stories thatwould take its place beside the earlier books In Our Time, Men WithoutWomen, and Winner Take Nothing. On February 7 he wrote from his homein Key West to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners suggesting such a book.At that time he had already completed five stories: "The Denunciation," "TheButterfly and the Tank," "Night Before Battle," "Nobody Ever Dies," and"Landscape with Figures," which is published here for the first time. A sixthstory, "Under the Ridge," would appear shortly in the March 1939 edition ofCosmopolitan.

As it turned out, Hemingway's plans for that new book did not pan out. He hadcommitted himself to writing three "very long" stories to round out thecollection (two dealing with battles in the Spanish Civil War and one about theCuban fisherman who fought a swordfish for four days and four nights only tolose it to sharks). But once Hemingway got underway on his novel -- later published as For Whom the Bell Tolls -- all other writing projects werelaid aside. We can only speculate on the two war stories he abandoned, but itis probable that much of what they might have included found its way into thenovel. As for the story of the Cuban fisherman, he did eventually return to itthirteen years later when he developed and transformed it into his famousnovella, The Old Man and the Sea.

Many of Hemingway's early stories are set in northern Michigan, where hisfamily owned a cottage on Waloon Lake and where he spent his summers as a boyand youth. The group of friends he made there, including the Indians who livednearby, are doubtless represented in various stories, and some of the episodesare probably based at least partly on fact. Hemingway's aim was to conveyvividly and exactly moments of exquisite importance and poignancy, experiencesthat might appropriately be described as "epiphanies." The posthumouslypublished "Summer People" and the fragment called "The Last Good Country" stemfrom this period.

Later stories, also set in America, relate to Hemingway's experiences as ahusband and father, and even as a hospital patient. The cast of characters andthe variety of themes became as diversified as the author's own life. Onespecial source of material was his life in Key West, where he lived in thetwenties and thirties. His encounters with the sea on his fishing boatPilar, taken together with his circle of friends, were the inspirationof some of his best writing. The two Harry Morgan stories, "One Trip Across" (Cosmopolitan, 1934) and "The Tradesman's Return" (Esquire, February 1936), which draw from this period, were ultimately incorporated into the novel To Have and Have Not, but it is appropriate and enjoyable to read them as separate stories, as they first appeared.

Hemingway must have been one of the most perceptive travelers in the history of literature, and his stories taken as a whole present a world of experience. In 1918 he signed up for ambulance duty in Italy as a member of an American Field Service unit. It was his first transatlantic journey and he was eighteen at the time. On the day of his arrival in Milan a munitions factory blew up, and with the other volunteers in his contingent Hemingway was assigned to gather up the remains of the dead. Only three months later he was badly wounded in both legsand hospitalized in the American Red Cross hospital in Milan, with subsequentoutpatient treatment. These wartime experiences, including the people he met,provided many details for his novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms.They also inspired five short story masterpieces.

In the 1920s he revisited Italy several times; sometimes as a professionaljournalist and sometimes for pleasure. His short story about a motor trip witha friend through Mussolini's Italy, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?," succeeds inconveying the harsh atmosphere of a totalitarian regime.

Between 1922 and 1924 Hemingway made several trips to Switzerland to gathermaterial for The Toronto Star. His subjects included economic conditionsand other practical subjects, but also accounts of Swiss winter sports:bobsledding, skiing, and the hazardous luge. As in other fields, Hemingway wasahead of his compatriots in discovering places and pleasures that would becometourist attractions. At the same time, he was storing up ideas for a number ofhis short stories, with themes ranging from the comic to the serious and themacabre.

Hemingway attended his first bullfight, in the company of American friends, in1923, when he made an excursion to Madrid from Paris, where he was living atthe time. From the moment the first bull burst into the ring he was overwhelmedby the experience and left the scene a lifelong fan. For him the spectacle of aman pitted against a wild bull was a tragedy rather than a sport. He wasfascinated by its techniques and conventions, the skill and courage required bythe toreros, and the sheer violence of the bulls. He soon became anacknowledged expert on bullfighting and wrote a famous treatise on the subject,Death in the Afternoon. A number of his stories also have bullfightingthemes.

In time, Hemingway came to love all of Spain -- its customs, its landscapes,its art treasures, and its people. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in thelast week of July 1936, he was a staunch supporter of the Loyalists, helping toprovide support for their cause and covering the war from Madrid as acorrespondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Out of the entirety ofhis experiences in Spain during the war he produced seven short stories inaddition to his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his play, TheFifth Column. It was one of the most prolific and inspired periods of hiswriting career.

In 1933, when his wife Pauline's wealthy uncle Gus Pfeiffer offered to stakethe Hemingways to an African safari, Ernest was totally captivated by theprospect and made endless preparations, including inviting a company of friendsto join them and selecting suitable weapons and other equipment for the trip.

The safari itself lasted about ten weeks, but everything he saw seems to havemade an indelible impression on his mind. Perhaps he regained, as the result ofhis enthusiasm and interest, a childlike capacity to record details almostphotographically. It was his first meeting with the famous white hunter PhillipPercival, whom he admired at once for his cool and sometimes cunningprofessionalism. At the end of the safari, Hemingway had filled his mind withimages, incidents, and character studies of unique value for his writings. Asthe harvest of the trip he wrote the nonfiction novel Green Hills ofAfrica, and some of his finest stories. These include "The Short Happy Lifeof Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" as well as "An AfricanStory," which appeared as a story within a story in The Garden of Eden,a novel published posthumously in May 1986.

In spite of the obvious importance of the Paris years on Hemingway'sdevelopment as a writer, few of his short stories have French settings. He wasaware of that fact and in his preface to A Moveable Feast wistfullymentions subjects that he might have written about, some of which might havebecome short stories.

During World War II Hemingway served as a war correspondent covering theNormandy invasions and the liberation of Paris. It seems that he also assembled a group of extramilitary scouts keeping pace with the retreating Germans. The balance between fiction and nonfiction in his stories of the period, including the previously unpublished "Black Ass at the Cross Roads," may never be determined.

Toward the end of his life Hemingway wrote two fables for the child of afriend, "The Good Lion" and "The Faithful Bull," which were published byHoliday in 1951 and are reprinted here. He also published two shortstories in The Atlantic Monthly, "Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog," and "A Man of the World" (both December 20, 1957).

We have grouped seven previously unpublished works of fiction at the back ofthe book. Four of these represent completed short stories; the other threecomprise extended scenes from unpublished, uncompleted novels.

All in all, this Finca Vigía edition contains twenty-one stories that were not included in "The First Forty-nine." The collection is named for Hemingway's home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. He lived at Finca Vigía ("Lookout Farm") on and off during the last two decades of his life. The finca was dear to his heart and it seems appropriate now that it should contain a major portion of his life work, which was even more dear.

-- Charles Scribner, Jr.

Copyright © 1987 by Simon & Schuster Inc.

Foreword

When Papa and Marty first rented in 1940 the Finca Vigía which was to be his home for the next twenty-two years until his death, there was still a real country on the south side. This country no longer exists. It was not done in by middle-class real estate developers like Chekhov's cherry orchard, which might have been its fate in Puerto Rico or Cuba without the Castro revolution, but by the startling growth of the population of poor people and their shack housing which is such a feature of all the Greater Antilles, no matter what their political persuasion.

As children in the very early morning lying awake in bed in our own little house that Marty had fixed up for us, we used to listen for the whistling call of the bobwhites in that country to the south.

It was a country covered in <...

Customer Reviews

Hemingway - What more needs to be said?
Hemingway is one of the greatest short story masters of all time. Full of deep, thought provoking storylines, Hemingway will always be one of the best.

Well crafted
I agree that Hemingway wrote well crafted stories. He was definitely a master at this. However, writing stories that hold the readers attention, is a quality that was lacking. Overall, the stories were dull and uninteresting.

Snappy prose!
It's fantastic to have all these stories in one book. "Hills Like White Elephant's" is still my favorite story, but I also enjoyed some that I had never heard of. I like the short declarative sentences; it makes for an easy read. I love that I can open it up to any story and just start reading. You don't have to start from the beginning and read it to the end. Each story only takes an hour at most to read - some probably twenty minutes if you're an extra fast reader.