Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961. 

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The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway

Scribner

Publisher's Preface

There has long been a need for a complete and up-to-date edition of the short

stories of Ernest Hemingway. Until now the only such volume was the omnibus

collection of the first forty-nine stories published in 1938 together with

Hemingway's play The Fifth Column. That was a fertile period of

Hemingway's writing and a number of stories based on his experiences in Cuba

and 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 that

would take its place beside the earlier books In Our Time, Men Without

Women, and Winner Take Nothing. On February 7 he wrote from his home

in Key West to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners suggesting such a book.

At that time he had already completed five stories: "The Denunciation," "The

Butterfly and the Tank," "Night Before Battle," "Nobody Ever Dies," and

"Landscape with Figures," which is published here for the first time. A sixth

story, "Under the Ridge," would appear shortly in the March 1939 edition of

Cosmopolitan.

As it turned out, Hemingway's plans for that new book did not pan out. He had

committed himself to writing three "very long" stories to round out the

collection (two dealing with battles in the Spanish Civil War and one about the

Cuban fisherman who fought a swordfish for four days and four nights only to

lose it to sharks). But once Hemingway got underway on his novel -- later published as For Whom the Bell Tolls -- all other writing projects were

laid aside. We can only speculate on the two war stories he abandoned, but it

is probable that much of what they might have included found its way into the

novel. As for the story of the Cuban fisherman, he did eventually return to it

thirteen years later when he developed and transformed it into his famous

novella, The Old Man and the Sea.

Many of Hemingway's early stories are set in northern Michigan, where his

family owned a cottage on Waloon Lake and where he spent his summers as a boy

and youth. The group of friends he made there, including the Indians who lived

nearby, are doubtless represented in various stories, and some of the episodes

are probably based at least partly on fact. Hemingway's aim was to convey

vividly and exactly moments of exquisite importance and poignancy, experiences

that might appropriately be described as "epiphanies." The posthumously

published "Summer People" and the fragment called "The Last Good Country" stem

from this period.

Later stories, also set in America, relate to Hemingway's experiences as a

husband and father, and even as a hospital patient. The cast of characters and

the variety of themes became as diversified as the author's own life. One

special source of material was his life in Key West, where he lived in the

twenties and thirties. His encounters with the sea on his fishing boat

Pilar, taken together with his circle of friends, were the inspiration

of 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 legs

and hospitalized in the American Red Cross hospital in Milan, with subsequent

outpatient 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 professional

journalist and sometimes for pleasure. His short story about a motor trip with

a friend through Mussolini's Italy, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?," succeeds in

conveying the harsh atmosphere of a totalitarian regime.

Between 1922 and 1924 Hemingway made several trips to Switzerland to gather

material for The Toronto Star. His subjects included economic conditions

and other practical subjects, but also accounts of Swiss winter sports:

bobsledding, skiing, and the hazardous luge. As in other fields, Hemingway was

ahead of his compatriots in discovering places and pleasures that would become

tourist attractions. At the same time, he was storing up ideas for a number of

his short stories, with themes ranging from the comic to the serious and the

macabre.

Hemingway attended his first bullfight, in the company of American friends, in

1923, when he made an excursion to Madrid from Paris, where he was living at

the time. From the moment the first bull burst into the ring he was overwhelmed

by the experience and left the scene a lifelong fan. For him the spectacle of a

man pitted against a wild bull was a tragedy rather than a sport. He was

fascinated by its techniques and conventions, the skill and courage required by

the toreros, and the sheer violence of the bulls. He soon became an

acknowledged expert on bullfighting and wrote a famous treatise on the subject,

Death in the Afternoon. A number of his stories also have bullfighting

themes.

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 the

last week of July 1936, he was a staunch supporter of the Loyalists, helping to

provide support for their cause and covering the war from Madrid as a

correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Out of the entirety of

his experiences in Spain during the war he produced seven short stories in

addition to his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his play, The

Fifth Column. It was one of the most prolific and inspired periods of his

writing career.

In 1933, when his wife Pauline's wealthy uncle Gus Pfeiffer offered to stake

the Hemingways to an African safari, Ernest was totally captivated by the

prospect and made endless preparations, including inviting a company of friends

to 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 have

made an indelible impression on his mind. Perhaps he regained, as the result of

his enthusiasm and interest, a childlike capacity to record details almost

photographically. It was his first meeting with the famous white hunter Phillip

Percival, whom he admired at once for his cool and sometimes cunning

professionalism. At the end of the safari, Hemingway had filled his mind with

images, incidents, and character studies of unique value for his writings. As

the harvest of the trip he wrote the nonfiction novel Green Hills...