Hemingway was drawn to the conflict between individual and nature, whether that conflict took the form of hunting or fishing or the ritualized and scripted form of the bullfight. In the 1930s and 1940s, Hemingway developed these themes not only in the stories and novels but also in the nonfiction works that contributed to his celebrity. This chapter explores Hemingway’s elaboration of the face-off with death first in the two substantial nonfiction works that dominate his work of the 1930s: Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa. Death in the Afternoon purports to be a general reader’s introduction to the exotic sport/ritual sacrifice/art form of the Spanish bullfight. Green Hills of Africa recounts and interprets the big-game hunting that Hemingway undertook on safari in Africa. The text invites (or requires) an engagement with colonialism and Hemingway’s inescapable implication in a colonizing view of the relationship of the Euro-American hunter to the landscape, animals, and people of Africa. In his fiction of this period, Hemingway also sets the individual’s doomed search for meaning in the contexts of crime, especially in the story collection Winner Take Nothing and in his novel To Have and Have Not.

The last decade of Hemingway’s life is characterized by the culmination of his recognition as a great writer and, at the same time, by a diminution of his writerly power. During that decade, Hemingway continued to write prolifically and to be recognized for his literary achievements. His thematic preoccupations remained consistent; he continued to write on bullfighting (a substantial article for Life magazine) and on big-game hunting and sport fishing (including The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novella). The chapter also assesses the novels and nonfiction books published after Hemingway’s death in 1961: A Moveable Feast, Islands in the Stream, and Garden of Eden. With the possible exception of A Moveable Feast, the extent to which these books should be read as “books by Ernest Hemingway” is debatable. The author was famous for the work of condensation and cutting that characterized his revision process absent from the final preparation of their manuscripts. In the strongest passages of all of this work, Hemingway is able to thematize the exhaustion and belatedness that he seems to have been struggling against, so that even the failed work offers rewards to the careful reader.

This chapter follows Hemingway from his journalistic work in the early 1920s through the publication of The Sun Also Rises in 1926. Ambitious to write fiction that would be innovative and popular, Hemingway absorbed the influences of Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and others as he adapted news stories into sketches and wrote short stories based on combat experience and on his youth. Hemingway’s early style grew in the rich soil of literary experimentation in Paris in the 1920s, where he encountered an international literary and artistic avant-garde. This earliest work exemplifies Hemingway’s experimentation and its relationship to his deep need to express the apparently inexpressible contents of his psyche and experience. The reception of his 1925 story collection In Our Time established his early reputation. This chapter’s reading of The Sun Also Rises emphasizes Hemingway’s ironic deployment of both received narrative conventions and religiously significant pilgrimage and ritual themes, which locates Hemingway in a crucial vein of literary modernism exemplified by Eliot’s The Waste Land. Like these other modernist works, Hemingway’s novel is immured in the social attitudes within which he worked; anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia tangle the novel’s surface texture but also shape its narrative structures.