Product Description

The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories contains ten of Hemingway's most acclaimed and popular works of short fiction. Selected from Winner TakeNothing, Men Without Women, and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, this collection includes "The Killers," the first of Hemingway's mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical "Fathers and Sons," which alludes, for the first time in Hemingway's career, to his father's suicide; "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," a "brilliant fusion of personal observation, heresay, and invention," wrote Hemingway's biographer, Carlos Baker; and the title story itself, of which Hemingway said: "I put all the true stuff in," with enough material, he boasted, to fill four novels. Beautiful in their simplicity, startling in their originality, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America's master storytellers at the top of his form.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21636 in Books
• Published on: 1995-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.com Review
Returning from a Kenyan safari in 1932, Ernest Hemingway quickly devised a literary trophy to add to his stash of buffalo hides and rhino horns. To this day, Green Hills of Africa seems an almost perverse paean to the thrills of bloodshed, in which the author cuts one notch after another in his gun barrel and declares, "I did not mind killing anything." Four years later, however, Hemingway came up with a more accomplished spin on his African experiences--a pair of them, in fact, which he collected with eight other tales in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. The title story is a meditation on corruption and mortality, two subjects that were already beginning to preoccupy the 37-year-old author. As the protagonist perishes of gangrene out in the bush, he recognizes his own failure of nerve as a writer:

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.

In the story, at least, the hero gets some points for stoic acceptance, as well as an epiphanic vision of Kilimanjaro's summit, "wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun." (The movie version is another matter: Gregory Peck makes it back to the hospital, loses a leg, and is a better person for it.) But Hemingway's other great white hunter, in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber," is granted a less dignified exit. This time the issue is cowardice, another of Papa's bugaboos: poor Francis is too wimpy to face down a wounded lion, let alone satisfy his treacherous wife in bed. Yet he does manage a last-minute triumph before dying--an absolute assertion of courage--which makes the title a hair less ironic than it initially seems. No wonder these are two of the highest-caliber (so to speak) tales in the Hemingway canon. --Bob Brandeis

From Library Journal
It's not often that this column gets to cite something by a truly classic author, but here it is: Hemingway's last work, written after he returned from his 1953 safari and edited by his son, Patrick, in time for this July's centennial celebration. Hemingway even stars in this "fictional memoir," running the safari camp in the absence of friend and lead hunter Pop even as hostile tribes gather to attack. But he still has time to sneak in an affair with an African girl. Along with this work, Scribner will publish three new hardcover editions of Hemingway classics: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories (ISBN 0-684-86221-2. $25), Death in the Afternoon (ISBN 0-684-85922-X. $35), and To Have and Have Not (ISBN 0-684-85923-8. $25).
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. At seventeen he left home to join the Kansas City Star as a reporter, then volunteered to serve in the Red Cross during World War I. He was severely wounded at the Italian front and was awarded the Croce di Guerra. He moved to Paris in 1921, where he devoted himself to writing fiction, and where he fell in with the expatriate circle that included Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), To Have and Have Not (1937), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

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Customer Reviews

Mediocre

I gave a brief try to Hemingway two or three years ago that didn't stick, though I don't remember the volume. Then, the other day, with full-on earnestness, I grabbed up this book. I thought it was pretty simple stuff. He seems to be write absolutely from the gut. Short sentences, bland sentences. Nothing that is deeply thoughtful or even conscious.

He is well-known as a macho writer who nonetheless delivered a genius to mass and critical audiences. But I'm not sure I understand how or why. I ought to try one on his famous novels before haranguing the icon, but there is almost no temptation after reading this collection.

I give him credit for conjuring up thick clouds of weird, dark emotion over seemingly fleeting events (one story in this collection, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, does this particularly well), but the balance was a disappointment.

Great Stories
This is a good collection of some of Hemmingway's short stories. They are all brilliant. It is Hemmingway though so you wouldn't expect any less. Excellent reading.

Hemingway at his best and otherwise
There are two exceptional stories in this volume: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Mccomber. Both of these stories satisfied my need for other places and experiences while exploring the familiar ground of long term, mildly satisfactory relationships. The other stories are hit and miss, but still they are Hemingway's and so, if you like his work as I do, they hit the mark more often than they fall short.