Ernest Hemingway

Born on July 21, 1899, in Cicero (now in Oak Park), Illinois, Ernest Hemingway served in World War I and worked in journalism before publishing his story collection In Our Time. He was renowned for novels like The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the 1953 Pulitzer. In 1954, Hemingway won the Nobel Prize. He committed suicide on July 2, 1961, in Ketchum, Idaho.

The Essential Hemingway is the perfect introduction to the astonishing, wide-ranging body of work by the Nobel Prize-winning author. This impressive collection includes: the full text of Fiesta, Hemingway’s first major novel; long extracts from three of his greatest works of fiction, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls; twenty-five complete short stories; and the breathtaking Epilogue to Death in the Afternoon.

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway’s most beloved works. Since Hemingway’s personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now this new special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.

‘I remember seeing the lion looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby-looking tree in a patch of orchard bush and P. O. M. kneeling to shoot him. Then there was the short-barrelled explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a run, a strange, heavy-shouldered, foot-swinging cat run. I hit him with the Springfield and he went down…’

High in the pine forests of the Spanish Sierra, a guerrilla band prepares to blow up a vital bridge. Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer, has been sent to handle the dyamiting. There, in the mountains, he finds the dangers and the intense comradeship of war. And there he discovers Maria, a young woman who has escaped from Franco’s rebels. Like many of his novels adapted into a major Hollywood film, For Whom the bell Tolls is one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century by one of the greatest American writers.

Inspired by Hemingway’s adventures as a newspaper correspondent in Spain in the 1930s, The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War magnificently evokes life in a besieged city over a tumultuous decade. Featuring the author’s only full-length play, the works recount decadent parties and doomed love affairs amid the rubble, and effortlessly capture the devastating effects of the war on the inhabitants of the city.

Men and women of passion and action live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. From haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro to brutal sensationalism in the bullring; from rural America with its deceptive calm to the heart of war-ravaged Europe, each of the stories in this classic collection is a feat of imagination, and a masterpiece of description. The Snows of Kilimanjaro is one of the best known and loved collections of stories by one of the greatest literary novelists of the twentieth century.

From Ernest Hemingway’s Preface: ‘There are many kinds of stories in this book. I hope you will find some that you like- In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dulled and know I had to put it on the grindstone and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining, and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.