The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 1926

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961, Nobel Prize 1954) is an iconic figure of the super-macho, hard drinking, womanizing, big game and sport fishing, bull fight loving American war reporter turned literary writer.  I recently read through his complete short stories and among them are some genuine classics.

The Son Also Rises was Hemingway's first novel.   Set in Paris and Spain between the world wars, it centers on two Americans, alcoholics both.  I see this book as a classic according to American High School teachers trying to be patriotic, teachers who have never read Proust, Henry James, Balzac, Flannery O'Connor, or hundred of real classics.   I know his style had great influence on American Literature.  I got tired of the constant remarks about Jews in the novel.   I know this is how mainstream Americans often thought in 1925 and of course it does not mean Hemingway was anti-Semitic I just got sick of it and caused me to lose interest in the novel.  In 1941 or so I could see Germans in Paris saying, "here is true American classic".  The central characters did not interest me.  I also do not like cruelty to animals and the bullfighting and bull running sections are all about this.  It would be a travesty to place this on a par with the truly best of world literature.  If you like drunken, Jew hating characters who love seeing bulls killed for sport, this is your classic.  

The edition of the book I read is The Ernest Hemingway Library Edition, forthcoming this year.  It contains articles by a son and a grandson of the author, deleted chapters and early revisions.   I skipped the added material, few but those who teach Hemingway will read them and the introduction had really nothing new to say.

If you want to experience the best of Hemingway, read his short stories.  If you want to read this novel, get a library copy.  I do not suggest the purchase of this book, projected price is $26.00 to anyone who does not have a poster of Hemingway in his "man cave.  It seems just like a transparent grab for profits.

Mel u

Word Counts and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (The Finca Vigia Edition, 1987, 650 pages)

My Top Ten Hemingway Short Stories

Key Word Counts 

I have now completed the first of my 2013 Reading Projects, the short stories of Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961, USA, Nobel Prize, 1954).   Reading, for me anyway, a 650 page collection of 71 short stories is much more "labor intensive" experience than reading most novels of the same length.   Of course I liked, as does everyone, some of his short stories more than others and a few did kind of drag on for me and as a personal note I do not like, even though I know it is reflective of how people talked at the time, dialogue that makes constant use of race based abusive terms to refer to non-caucasian races and there is a lot of that in these stories.   Here are my favorite stories:

1. "The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber"  
2. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" -I picked this story as the American entry for project 196
3. "Indian Camp"
4. "Hills Like Elephants" 
5. "Old Man at the Bridge"
6. "Soldier's Home"
7. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"
8. "A Cat in the Rain"
9. "Homage to Switzerland"
10. "The Killers"-Dorthy Parker said it was the best short story written in 1929

I think it is worth the time for those into the short story to read this collection.  There are stories that are too long, like the ones set on the Key West Fishing Boats, the Captain Willie stories.  Many will be turned off or bored by the hunting and fishing stories, offended by constant use of racial slang, and find the stories, as fits the Hemingway image, overly macho.   This said, the characterizations are brilliant, the technical skill in the best stories is among the best.   If you want to just read a sample, not a bad idea for those with limited reading time, try the stories above and don't give up even if you do not like the subject matter of the opening stories.   

Word Counts

I decided to try a literary experiment to see if it might be of interest.  I took a number of expressions and searched the full text of the short stories for them.   In order to have a comparison I also scanned for the same expressions in two collections of short stories (total page count of these two collections and the Hemingway anthology is about the same).  I picked Best American Short Stories 2012 and Best British Short Stories 2012 for my comparisons.   These two books contain stories by about 40 writers.   I decided to search on "death", "home", "dark", "god", "clean", "drink", "green", "blue", "father", "mother", "money", "love" and "lone" (to find both "lonely" and "alone"-it also found "lone" meaning one but I filtered those out in my results.  

1. Death  Hemingway 27, Best of 2012 books combined 41
2. Home H-130  Best Stories 261
3. God H 91  Best 64
4. Clean  H 101  Best 46
5. Drink H 324  Best 148
6. Green H 54   Best 108
7. Blue  H 97 Best 46
8. Mother H 225  Best 244
9. Father 326 Best 212
10. dark  204  Best 148
11. money   H 121  Best 68
12. love   H  282 times  Best 80
13. lone- to find lonely and lone  H 85 Best 80

"Ernest, I think there is something
missing in your life"- Carmilla

I am not ready to draw any big conclusions from these word counts.  I think numbers 2, 4, 5, and 12 may have a lot to tell us.   When you scan a collection of short stories written over decades it is hard not to see the preoccupations of the writers.  You can, I think, see into the mind of an author using this without knowing anything of their lives.   Before  E-readers it would have taken a very long time and been very tedious to make these counts.   

I would really appreciate it if readers could suggest other key terms to search.   

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" by Ernest Hemingway (1936, 22 pages)

Project 196

USA

3 of 196 Countries

My Introductory Post on Project 196

1. Georgia
2. Canada
3. U. S. A.

If you are an author and want to represent your country, please contact me.  If you want to do a guest post on your favorite story for the feature please contact me also.

If you are a publisher that has an anthology that is done in the 196 spirit, please contact me as I will be spotlighting appropriate collections.  

At first I thought I was setting myself an impossible task but a bit of research has made me optimistic  that I can find a short story from all 196 countries in the world.   I feel this part of the project will be completed.

I also want, and maybe this is crazy, to publish a short story, over the next 196 weeks from a writer in each 196 countries.  So the project has two parts, one perhaps not as crazy as it seemed at first  and the other totally crazy!   

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961, USA) is considered an American a writer as one can find.  He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954 and is famous for novels like The Sun Also Rise, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea.  Some say his best work was in his short stories with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" being ranked as among his greatest works.  As an Icon he exemplifies and more or less created the cultural figure of the hard drinking, fast living, womanizing super macho writer.  It was once fashionable to dismiss his work as inferior to the best of modern literature but I think a turn has come in that attitude. Even if you do not like his subject matter you have to admire his technical brilliance, the beauty of his prose, the depth of his psychological insight and the verisimilitude of his characters.  

I chose "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" for my American representative for Project 196 as I think, even though it is set in Africa, it is  a very American story.   The cynical part of me saw the plot action of this story as embodying American foreign policy during the Bush years.  The central character goes to a foreign country, way less developed than the USA or Europe, treats the natives as personal servants. destroys the natural resources for his own uses, in this case just for the pleasure of killing wild animals who he traps into defending themselves so killing them seems justified and reaffirms his manhood and sense of being alive.   He lives from resources he does not have through making a wealthy woman fall in love with him and when he gets in trouble he treats his own issues as if they were the center of the world.   Others will see this as a story of a man, acting in bad faith, trying to reaffirm his manhood, escape the boredom and sadness of lost talent (he was a writer) and of a woman living from the glory of a man.  There is a lot of drinking and talk of womanizing in this story.  

It is a wonderfully done story.   It does not in any way celebrate they things I have talked about but underlies the tragedies they will bring on all who fall into the traps set for the characters in this brilliant work of art.

As one of my  projects, I am reading all of the short stories of Ernest Hemingway and posting on a few of them.

Mel u

"Soldier's Home" by Ernest Hemingway

"Soldier's Home" by Ernest Hemingway (1925, 6 pages)

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

A Reading Life Project

My Prior Posts on Hemingway

"Krebs went to war from a Methodist college in Kansas."

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) is considered one of America's best writers.   He won the Nobel Prize in 1954.   Among his most famous works are  For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.  In the long ago I read most of his major novels but I neglected his short stories.  Now I know that many, including Clifton Fadiman, consider them his greatest legacy.   The total volume of his short stories in under 700 pages, way less than many a novel.   I have decided to read all of them, though I probably will only post on a few of them.   

Hemingway wrote a lot of stories and longer works that deal with war.   "Soldier's Home" is about a man, not as young as he was when he left, back in Kansas after serving in the USA Army during WWI.  It is told in the third person in a minimalist style.   There are only three on stage characters in the story.   Harold Krebs comes home deeply troubled by his war experiences.   This story line maybe a cliche now but I do not think it was in 1925.   He knows he no longer fits in at his parents comfortable home in Kansas and he knows he cannot make his family understand how he has changed.  I think, this is just a guess, that he picked the state of Kansas (near the geographical center of America) as it was considered somehow a bland place of simple values and people.   As in the famous line from The Wizard of Oz, "Toto, I think we are not in Kansas anymore".   We also have his deeply religious mother who wants him to find a job and a girlfriend who will become a wife so he can "settle back in as the other fellows are".   Herbert's younger sister who worships him is also in the story and he tries to relate to her to help him feel the innocence that is lost to him forever.

This is a very good story.   

The story is not yet in the public domain  but it can be read online (I read it in the collection) here.

Often teachers will place copy written stories online for their classes not realizing anyone can find it.  

I read this story as part of my participation in The War Through the Generations WWI Reading Challenge

Do you have a favorite Hemingway short story?

Mel u

"Old Man at the Bridge" by Ernest Hemingway

"Old Man at the Bridge" by Ernest Hemingway (1923,  6 pages)

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

A Reading Life Project

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) is considered one of America's best writers.   He won the Nobel Prize in 1954.   Among his most famous works are  For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms.  In the long ago I read most of his major novels but I neglected his short stories.  Now I know that many, including Clifton Fadiman, consider them his greatest legacy.   The total volume of his short stories in under 700 pages, way less than many a novel.   I have decided to read all of them, though I probably will only post on a few of them.   

"Old Man at the Bridge" is one of Hemingway's early short stories. It is set in the war against the Fascists in Spain.    It is  a terribly sad very beautiful story about the consequences of war in the life of an old man.   The story is told in the first person by a man whose is assigned the duty of discovering how far the enemy has advanced.   He comes upon a man in his mid-seventies.   He asks the man what he is doing.    He tells him he had to flee because of the advancing soldiers.   His only concern is for the animals he was caring for.   All the old man had was his animals, he stayed until he was ordered to go.

You can read the story if you like.   There is deep pain in the last lines:

"the fact that cats know how to look after themselves was all the good luck that old man would ever have".   I think I know what that means and I kind of wish I did not.   This is a great short story.

Do you have a favorite Hemingway short story?   

Mel u

Ernest Hemingway's First Short Story and Hemingway and Gellhorn -The HBO Movie

"Up In Michigan" by Ernest Hemingway (1923, 8 pages)
Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012, AN  H B O Movie)

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

A Reading Life Project

"Up In Michigan"

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961)  is considered one of the best American writers.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.  Among his most famous works are novels like For Whom  the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rise, and A Farewell to Arms.      Some consider his short stories to be his greatest legacy.  In fact this project sort of began in my mind numerous decades ago when I  saw that Clifton Fadiman listed the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway in his book, The Life Time Reading Plan.  I also recently watched a 2012 made by H B O movie based on Hemingway's romance and marriage with Martha Gellhorn,  a war correspondent and the inspiration for For Whom the Bell Tolls.  I have, in the long ago, read all of the major novels of Hemingway and the fact that I still recall them is a tribute to their power.

I decided to start at the beginning with Hemingway's very first story (there are two or three stories that might based on my limited research be his first short story but for sure "Up in Michigan is one of the very first ).   There are only two characters in this story, Jim who works as a blacksmith (by then a dying occupation) in a small town and a waitress, Liz, who works in a restaurant  where Jim often eats.   The story is told from the point of view of Liz, in the third person.   We do not learn much about Jim other than the thoughts Liz has about his looks.   Liz begins to fantasize about Jim but feels a sense of shame over this.   Liz and Jim go for a walk one night.   Maybe Jim has detected her feeling for him.   They have a sexual encounter which borders on a rape.   I admit I was shocked by how brutal Jim was and how powerless Liz was.   There is a lot of power to disturb in this story

The language in the story is very sparse.   For sure the prose is right out of the minimalist camp.    I enjoyed seeing how much Hemingway could get out of a few words.   I greatly enjoyed reading this story.

Hemingway is more than just a Nobel Prize winning author.   He almost created the figure of the American hard drinking, into guns and hunting, bullfighting, and big game fishing, womanizing, out of control bad boy image of the writer living life at double speed with little regard for petty social conventions.   The H B O movie, Hemingway and Gellhorn, plays totally up to that view of Hemingway.   We get a super heavy drinking, no doubt alcoholic, man who cannot be faithful to a woman, given to hanging out with his male friends in Frat party settings , quick with his temper and ready to beat up anyone who criticizes  his work.    He needs a woman to act as his muse, baby sitter, and emotional punching bag.   His redeeming feature is that he totally loves cats and hates Fascism.   I do not know enough about his life to know if the movie is accurate or not but it was fun to watch and interesting to  see how Hollywood portrayed Hemingway.   The parts of the movie I liked best were those set in China, in Spain during the fight against Franco and for sure the scenes with his beloved cats. The ending was hard to watch and it was painful to see Hemingway in his last moments.    I enjoyed watching this movie and others can pass judgement if the they like on its historical accuracy.   

Mel u

Dorothy Parker's Picks for the Best American Short Stories of 1927

"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway (1927, 5 pages)
"Another Wife"  by Sherwood Anderson (1927, 6 pages)
"The Short Story, Through a Couple of Ages" by Dorothy Parker (1927, 4 pages)

Today is day four of BBAW (Book Blogger  Appreciation Week).   Among the very most viewed posts on my blog (out of 750+) are those I have done on Dorothy Parker (1893 to 1967-USA).   All of  her stories are good and "Big Blond" is a work of genius (and also a warning!)   In addition to her stories and other literary works she wrote hundreds of short opinion articles for The New Yorker.   So in the spirit of community building and in honor of Dorothy Parker (who you know would have a great blog)  I am posting on what she says are the two best short stories of 1927.

"Another Wife"  by Sherwood Anderson

There is more to Sherwood Anderson (1876 to 1941-USA)  than his great collection of linked short stories, Winesburg, Ohio.   (I have included some background information on him in a prior post.)      "Another Wife" is told in the first person by a forty-eight year old physician.   It is kind of a strange story, nothing surprising about that.    We learn he is a widower.    His first wife and he came from poor families and this was part of their bond.   He talks quite a bit about how "plump" she was.   It is hard to see if he liked that or if it was a problem for him.  He has found a lady friend who comes to visit him at his house several times a month.   She is from a prosperous family and he talks over and over about how she is "plump" also and compares her size to that of his late wife.   As the story goes on a bit, we learn he is in fact married to this new woman.  At first I was confused but then I think he never mentioned it earlier as in his heart he does not really think she is his wife at all.   This is a very good story and Parker is to be commended for her excellent taste.

"The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) is your all American iconic writer.    He won the Nobel Prize and wrote several of the most loved American novels like The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls.   He is also very famous as a short story writer.   I think "The Killers" is one of his most famous and highest regarded short stories.  It sort of reminds me of something Quentin Taratino could make into a movie!    The story is set in a small restaurant.   The characters are the owner of the restaurant, the cook, two customers (the killers) and their intended victim.   It is almost all dialogue.  

As the story opens two men are in a diner.   They tell the owner they want to order the dinner special.   He tells them they are too early to get that and the men try to bait him into a conversation.   It is really well done and pretty scary in a way.   I will compress my summery a lot.   The two men have sawed off shot guns under their coats and the cook and the owner are very frightened.  The men tell them  they are at the diner as they know a man they are going to kill as a favor to a friend comes in everyday for the dinner.   I will leave the rest of the plot untold as it is the wonderful way Hemingway uses a minimum amount of dialogue to tell the story that makes it so great.   Of these two stories, I guess I would say this one is the best and for sure it is the most famous. 

You can read "Another Wife" Here 

You can read "The Killers" Here

You can read Parker's article Here

Mel u

"Cat in the Rain" by Ernest Hemingway

"A Cat in the Rain" by Ernest Hemingway (1925, 4 pages)

Stories About Cats Day, Part II

Today seems to be a day for reading stories  revolving around cats.    Earlier today I posted on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat", a story I really liked.    I last read a work by Hemingway (1899 to 1961-USA) about a year ago when I read and posted on "Hills Like Elephants" and "A Clean, Well Light Place.    (There is some background information on Hemingway in my prior post.)     I would say I am sort of ambivalent in my attitude toward Hemingway.     In part he seems a bit of a poseur.    The women in his work seem to exist only as they relate to a dominate man who they try to please.   Some times I like his minimalistic prose and at times I find it tiresome, almost boring.      As a personal note unrelated to the quality of his work I find some of the subject matter of his work-hunting and fishing trips-distasteful.     At times I also think Hemingway is a very powerful story teller who creates a  world in  a few lines.   Historically he is important and many people love him.  

"A Cat in the Rain" is set in Italy.    There are only two real characters in the story, an American couple on a vacation.    I think the fact that the couple are Americans is somehow meant to suggest that the man is a bit of a brute.   We sense the woman is not getting the love she feels she needs and is entitled to from the man.    She spots a cat outside in the rain and she starts saying she wishes she could have the cat for a pet.    She clearly knows the man does not want this and is simply trying to force his attention onto her.     I did enjoy  the ending when the woman's bluff is called and we see her absurdity.    I will say I am glad I read this story.  It took me only a few minutes.    I think I need to read more Hemingway.

Mel u

Ernest Hemingway "Hills Like Elephants" and "A Clean, Well Light Place"

"Hills Like Elephants"  (1927 -6 pages) and "A Clean,  Well Light Place" (1926, pages) both by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899 to 1961) won the Nobel Prize for fiction in 1954.   He is the author of such American classics as A Farewell to Arms  (based on his WWI experiences as an ambulance driver), The Sun Also Rises and The Old Man and The Sea all of which I read long ago. He also wrote a number of short stories that have near canon status including the two I just read.    In the public eye he is identified with hyper-masculine activities like bull fighting, big game hunting,  deep sea fishing and wars.    He was initially helped into print by Ford Madox Ford but in time turned against him.     Hemingway is known for his lean sparse prose.    Some consider him a writer that "manly men" can admire and take with them on a moose hunt.   Some see him as a poseur trying too hard to be masculine.   He is nearly always listed among top American novelists of the 20th century.     I think part of his continuing popularity may come from the fact that his works are easy to read and could readily be used as class room texts in places where Woolf, Joyce, Ford and Mansfield could not.    


  Hemingway skillfully throws us in the middle of a conversation of a man and a younger woman in a train station in Spain.    It is not explicitly said but the man and woman seem to be talking about whether or not the woman should get an abortion.   We do not learn the man's name but he calls the woman "Jig".    This is a degrading nickname with several slang meanings that were common knowledge in the 1920s.   "Jig" can mean a fast dance of the time and it also means sexual relations (You can verify this in Cassell's Dictionary of Slang) in the argot of the streets at the time.   I had the feeling the man in the story knew this but the woman did not.   Here is how their conversation starts out:

Well, let's try and have a fine time.'

'All right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn't that bright?'

'That was bright.'

'I wanted to try this new drink. That's all we do, isn't it - look at things and try new drinks?'

'I guess so.'

The girl looked across at the hills.

'They're lovely hills,' she said. 'They don't really look like white elephants. I just meant the colouring of their skin through the trees.'

'Should we have another drink?'

The man is doing his best to emotionally manipulate Jig into going through with the abortion.


Maybe the man just wants to get rid of a problem or maybe he really thinks it is the right thing to do, we are not sure.

'It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,' the man said. 'It's not really an operation at all.'

The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.

'I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.'

The girl did not say anything.

'I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in and then it's all perfectly natural.'

'Then what will we do afterwards?'

'We'll be fine afterwards. Just like we were before.'

'What makes you think so?'

'That's the only thing that bothers us. It's the only thing that's made us unhappy"

 We do not find out what happens.   


I also read his perhaps better known story "A Clean, Well Light Place".   Of the two stories I think I liked "Hills Like Elephants" best.   The style in both works is  the same-lean prose, no flowery images, no lush descriptions and don't use two words where one will do.   


I am glad I read these stories.   Some find his prose beautiful, some do not.   Both can be read online.   I have used the term "bookish boy book" before and for sure Hemingway is in this category.   


Mel u