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Big Two-Hearted River

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front face view of dark-haired, dark-eyed young man dressed in shirt, tie and jacket
Ernest Hemingway's 1923 passport photo taken two years before the publication of "Big Two-Hearted River"

"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway published in 1925 in the American edition of his first collection of short stories, In Our Time. Written in Hemingway's characteristic spare style and one of the earlier stories in which he used the theory of omission, the story features a single character and only a few lines of dialogue.

The writing style of the story was constructed to emulate the painting style of Paul Cézanne in which background details are less clear than foreground details. In the story great attention is given to describing the minutiae of a camping and fishing trip, whereas the background detail, such as the landscape and most particularly an area of swamp, is less well described. The destructive nature of war and the healing and regenerative powers of nature, to which Hemingway returned often in later work, are strong themes in the story.

It is a story in which little happens on the surface. Below the surface and never directly mentioned however, it is a story about Hemingway's autobiographical character Nick Adams as he undergoes a healing process in which nature and the life-giving forces of the river cleanse him from the destructive experiences of the war.

Background and publication history

Gertrude Stein, shown here with Hemingway's son Jack in 1924, advised him to trim the ending of "Big Two-Hearted River".

In the mid-1920s Hemingway, foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, lived in Paris with his wife Hadley, where he was friendly with and influenced by writers such as Gertrude Stein.[1] In 1923 his first work was published, a slim volume called Three Stories and Ten Poems, followed in 1924 by a second volume of 18 short vignettes, titled in our time (without capitals).[2][3] With the hope of having in our time published in New York, he began writing stories to add to the volume. "Big Two-Hearted River" was specifically written to be the last story in the volume, which he started in May 1924 but was not finished until September because he spent the summer helping Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford launch the literary journal transatlantic review.[4]

The unpublished version of the story included an 11 page section of stream of consciousness reminiscences written from Nick's point-of-view that Stein disliked. Hemingway cut the section, rewrote the ending of the story and told his editor, "I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book are crap".[5] Biographer James Mellow writes that at this early stage in his career, Hemingway's talent was not developed to the point to fully and capably integrate self-reflections in his writing but he believes the cut piece could have been a "tour-de-force" had it been written at a more mature period in Hemingway's development.[5]

In October 1924, Hemingway sent the manuscript of In Our Time to New York to be read by Don Stewart and book critic Edmund Wilson.[5] In January 1925, while wintering Schruns, Austria, waiting anxiously for a response from America, Hemingway submitted the story to be published in his friend Bill Walsh's newly established literary magazine This Quarter—Walsh paid 1000 French francs for the story, the highest payment for a piece of fiction Hemingway had yet to earn.[6]

On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of short stories In Our Time (with capital letters) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York, with a print-run of 1335 copies.[7] The last story in the volume was the two-part "Big Two-Hearted River" with each listed in the table of contents and the two parts separated by an interchapter vignette.[8]

"Big Two-Hearted River" was included in Hemingway's collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987).[9]

Plot summary

Part one
Nick was happy as he crawled inside his tent .... It had been a hard trip. He was very tired .... He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him. It was a good place to camp.
—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"[10]

In the story, Nick Adams arrives by train at the town of Seney to find that, because of a fire, "there was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country."[11] On a bridge leading away from the town, he watches the trout in the river and then he hikes up a hill. At a burned stump, he stops to rest, smokes a cigarette, and examines a grasshopper blackened by the fire. Later in the day he stops again in a glade of tall pines where he falls asleep. When he wakes he hikes the last mile to the edge of the river where he sees the trout feeding in the evening light "making circles all down the surface of the water as though it were starting to rain."[12] Carefully he pitches his tent, unpacks his supplies, makes his dinner, fills his water bucket, makes a pot of coffee, and kills a mosquito before falling asleep.

Part two

Early the next morning Nick fills a jar with 50 dew-heavy grasshoppers he finds in under a log in a "grasshopper lodging-house",[13] then has breakfast, drinks sweetened coffee and makes a sliced onion sandwich. After checking and assembling his fly-fishing rod, and tying on damp leader line, he goes to the river with a net hanging from his belt, a sack from his shoulders and the jar of grasshoppers from his neck. Wading in the water, he fishes the shallows where he lands a trout that "was mottled with clear, water-over-gravel color"[14] that he releases. Moving into a pool of deep water, he lands a large trout, "as broad as a salmon",[15] that he loses. After a rest, he moves away from the deep water, to the center of the river, and catches two trout that he stows in his sack. Sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette and eating his onion sandwich, he contemplates fishing the deep water of the swamp but decides to wait for another day. In the river, at the log, he kills, guts and cleans the two trout and then returns to his camp.

Writing style

Iceberg theory

In the early 1920s, Pound taught Hemingway to apply the concepts of imagism to his prose which resulted in the stripped down style characteristic of his early fiction. Hemingway said that Pound "taught [me] more about how to write and how not to write than any son of a bitch alive". At the same time, he learned from James Joyce "to pare down his work to the essentials".[16] Hemingway scholar Jackson Benson says that the short stories written in the 1920s adhere to Pound's definition of imagism,[17] and biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to "get the most from the least, how to prune language, how to multiply intensities, and how to tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".[18] The technique came to be known as the iceberg theory; as Baker describes Hemingway's writing, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.[18]

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
—Ernest Hemingway in Death in the Afternoon[19]

The iceberg theory is sometimes referred to as the "theory of omission". Hemingway believed a writer could describe one thing when actually writing about another. For example in "Big Two-Hearted River" Hemingway describes in detail mundane activities which mask the more important and unspoken ideas that lurk below the surface.[20] The story is full of detail: Nick catching grasshoppers, Nick making coffee, and the climatic event is Nick catching and losing a large trout, the excitement and tension of which is so strong that he has to take a break.[21]

Nothing much happens in the story—nothing much is meant to happen. The surface details are written to mask the deep inner turmoil Nick experiences upon his return from the war. The story is about a fishing trip, but it is also a story about finding a place of tranquility and rehabilitation.[22] Hemingway said of it, "'Big Two-Hearted River' is about a boy beat to the wide coming home from the war .... beat to the wide was an earlier and possibly more severe form of beat, since those who had were unable to comment on this condition and could not suffer that it be mentioned in their presence. So the war, all mention of the war, anything about the war is omitted."[23] Hemingway scholar Joseph Flora believes the story shows the concept the iceberg theory more than any piece written by Hemingway.[24]

Paul Smith writes about the In Our Time stories that Hemingway was still experimenting with his writing style; for example in "Big Two-Hearted River" the spare style wasn't a result of deletions but that Hemingway's sentences "began life as scrawny little things, and then grew to their proper size through a process of accretion."[25] As a technique to show that Nick wished the fishing trip to be as uncomplicated as possible Hemingway avoided complicated syntax. An analysis of the text shows that about 70 percent of the sentences are simple sentences—a childlike syntax without subordination—and that repetition is often substituted for subordinate thoughts. Furthermore, the repetition creates prose with a "rhythmic, ritualistic effect", that emphasizes important points. The length of the paragraphs vary, with short paragraphs intensifying the action.[26] Benson writes that in "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River", Hemingway's prose was sharper and more abstract than in other stories, and that by employing simple sentences and diction, techniques he learned writing for newpapers, the prose is timeless with an almost mythic quality.[17]

Paul Cézanne influence

While he was writing "Big Two-Hearted River" in 1924, Hemingway was influenced by Paul Cézanne's painting style. In an 1949 interview with Lillian Ross he said, "Cézanne is my painter after the early painters .... I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne, I learned how ... by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times."[27] He decided to structure "Big Two-Hearted River" like a Cézanne painting—with a detailed foreground and a vague background.[28] In a letter written to Stein in August, 1924, he wrote, "I have finished two long stories .... and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I am doing the country like Cézanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell. I made it all up".[29]

Hemingway said of Paul Cézanne's painting of the forest of Fontainebleu that "This is what we try to do in writing, this and this, and woods and the rocks we have to climb over".[30]

The river and the countryside are meant to convey a sense of post-impressionism, according to critic Ronald Berman. When the story was being written in Paris Hemingway was more influenced by modernists—such as Stein and Pound—than by his boyhood in Michigan.[31] He frequently visited the Musée du Luxembourg at which three Cézanne paintings were displayed: "L'Estaque (painting)", "Farmyard at Auvers-sur-Oise" and "The Poplars". A series of Cézanne's watercolors were exhibited that spring at Berheim-Jeune Gallery, of which Hemingway wrote many years later in A Moveable Feast that he had been "learning something from the painting of Cézanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them."[32]

According to Berman, the story resembles a Cézanne painting in that the first part is a "representation of form, space and light", with the descriptive passages presenting "light and form .... overwhelmingly visual, intensely concerned with spatiality", while in the middle-ground, "We sense [the trees] through vertical forms and dark colors only".[33] Like a Cézanne painting, the landscape in the story is representational: Seney burned in 1891, not in 1919; the hill Nick climbs does not exist; and the east branch of the Fox River, where he camped, is not a day's hike from the town.[34]

The story has a complex and minutely detailed foreground in the form of descriptions of the campsite and of performing mundane tasks such as preparing meals, whereas the background with the forest, and menacing swamp is described in a vague manner. Between the foreground and the background, acting as a separating barrier, is the fully described river, deep in places, shallow in others, with currents that are either slow or fast. Berman says Nick is cast as the figure in the painting, seen in the foreground at the campsite and at a distance from the murky background of the swamp.[35]

Symbolism

Because Nick appears unable to bear self-reflection or refuses to cope with his pain, the story is full of symbolism, in a series of objective correlatives, which forces the reader to understand Nick.[36] For example, when he arrives in Seney, Nick literally falls down, shocked at the sight of the the burned town; but on a deeper level he is in shock from his war experience. Leaving behind the burnt landscape, in the heat, Nick climbs a hill to survey the damage. The burning and heat symbolize Italy and war with the destruction he witnessed there, but Nick hopes for regrowth as he tells himself, "It could not all be burned. He knew that".[37] Beyond the town the bridge over the river still exists and the river symbolizes time and timelessness, healing and the natural cycle of life and death. He is on a quest, perhaps a religious quest, symbolized by the Christian symbol of the fish, which Nick watches from the bridge for a long time.[38]

In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through, except in patches; in the fast deep water in the half light, the fishing would be tragic ... Nick did not want it.
—Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River"[39]

Writing in "Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country", Kenneth Johnston says that Hemingway substituted symbolism for paint and brushstrokes. The burnt town with the railroad tracks that "slash across the landscape" he sees as similar to a Cézanne painting. From the town, a road goes into the pristine back-country, across a bridge, under which the trout hold steady against the current, just as Nick wants hold steady. From the bridge Nick glimpses a kingfisher taking wing, a bird that in mythology symbolizes "halcyon days, peace and tranquility". Johnston says that a large uprooted tree symbolizes Nick himself uprooted by war, and that his fragility is symbolized by the trout he releases carefully so as not to damage its protective slime coat. The campsite, set deep in a pine grove and described in soothing greens, symbolizes safety, while in the background beyond three logs, looms the swamp where he will not venture.[40]

At his campsite his tent is described as being less dark than outside and for Nick it is a place of safety.[41] The swamp, which Nick tries not to think about, is shrouded in mist at night. When he wakes in the morning, regenerated by sleep, he is stronger than the previous day and the swamp seems less threatening.[42]

Themes

War

Hemingway, who said of the effects of WWI that they were a "central fact of our time", admitted that in the story the war is never directly mentioned, although the story is about the devastation of war and Nick's post-war experience.[24] Writing in his essay "Soldier Home: Big Two-Hearted River", Hemingway scholar Joseph Flora believes Hemingway tells of Nick coping "more meaningfully than he had ever done before, with the issues of life and death",[37] while biographer Phillip Young says "Big Two-Hearted River" is a story of a young man who "is trying desperately to keep from going out of his mind."[43]

Ernest Hemingway, Milan 1918, age 19, recovering from shrapnel wounds

The story has strong autobiographical elements; Hemingway scholar Jackson Benson believes Hemingway used autobiographical details as framing devices to write about life in general—not only his own life.[44] At age 19, Hemingway joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver and was sent to the Italian Front in Fossalta;[45] On his first day there he helped to retrieve the remains of female workers killed at a munitions factory explosion, about which he later wrote in Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments".[46] A few days later, on July 8, he was severely wounded when a mortar exploded between his legs.[46] He was sent to a hospital in Milan where he recuperated for six months; after his return home to Michigan, in the summer of 1919, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends.[47] In September he went on a second fishing trip, alone, in Michigan's back-country—a trip that became the inspiration for "Big Two-Hearted River".[48] The story's manuscript shows the use of plural pronouns, suggesting that in early version more characters were included, but in the published version his high school friends have been written out and the town's people are gone—leaving Nick alone in the woods.[49]

In the story, Nick returns home from war wounded, and in him Hemingway introduces a character type that recurs in later stories and novels. "Big Two-Hearted River" is the first of the Nick Adams stories to mention that Nick suffers from an unspecified wound, which becomes a theme in Hemingway's writing a theme that culminates in the character of Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.[43] Hemingway scholar William Adair suggests that Nick's war experience was different, and perhaps more traumatic, than Hemingway's, writing that Nick's unspecified wound should not be confused or automatically identified with Hemingway's wound.[50]

Adair believes the river in the story is a fictional representation of the Piave River located near Fossalta, the site of Hemingway's wounding and that Hemingway took the idea of the swamp from the terrrain of the battle of Portogrande; a battle at which Hemingway wrote about in a 1922 newspaper story, saying of it: "Austrians and Italians attacked and counter-attacked waist deep in swamp water". Adair speculates that the battle in the swamp may have been the site of where Hemingway imagined Nick was wounded.[51] Hemingway's own wounding, Adair suggests in "Big Two-Hearted River: Why the Swamp is Tragic", is described as Nick loses a fish—the "biggest one I ever had"—with descriptive imagery such as shoes "squelchy" with water, suggestive of Hemingway's recollection of "feeling as if his boots were filled with warm water (blood) after his wounding."[52]

Benson believes that in his early fiction Hemingway was effective in creating a "what if" situation from a real situation and projecting it onto a fictional character—"What if I were wounded and made crazy?" the character asks himself. Moreover, Benson believes the autobiographical construct is most notable in Hemingway's best fiction such "Big Two-Hearted River", in which Nick is shown to be a daydreamer inhabiting a dream-like fictional world.[53] Before his death by suicide in 1961, writing in A Moveable Feast about his early years in Paris, Hemingway said of the story: "I sat in corner with the afternoon light coming in over my shoulder and wrote in the notebook .... When I stopped writing I did not want to leave the river where I could see the trout in the pool, it's surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistance of the log-driven piles of the bridge. The story was about coming back from the war but there was no mention of the war in it."[54]

Nature

In Hemingway's work nature is often a place of refuge and rebirth; his characters retreat to nature for emotional regeneration. It is in nature that a hunter or fisherman might experience an existential moment of transcendence—especially at the moment prey is killed.[55][56] In the story Nick crosses the unburned bridge, leaving behind the burnt town, entering the woods and hikes toward the river, which is unharmed by the fire and is constant. Nick will heal himself there; the river has two hearts because it gives life in the form of food (fish) and offers him redemption.[57] Safely in the woods, Nick stops in a grove of trees that is described as chapel-like, a description that echoes Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage in which Henry Fielding flees to a chapel-like grove of trees. Nick sleeps well in the grove, for the first time since the war, and there he begins the healing process. The next morning he faces the river, wading into the water to fish, however the strong current frightens him and he is momentarily unable to control himself in the river.[58]

The descriptions of the Michigan landscape, although familiar to Heminway, are written in a non-specific and representational manner.[44] Berman believes that in the story Hemingway used landscape like a painter's canvas on which he shows Nick's state of mind;[33] and the descriptions of the river's water are reminiscent of American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau's descriptions of the pond in Walden. Biographer Meyers says of the story that is shows a blend of American primitivism with sophistication; that Nick shows a sense of loss which is "not simply grace under pressure—but under siege".[59] In this story nature is perceived as good and civilization as bad—a pervasive theme in American literature, found in such American classics as Mark Twain's 19th-century Huckleberry Finn and in William Faulkner's 20th-century Go Down, Moses.[60]

Reception

"Big Two-Hearted River" was published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time.

Hemingway's writing style attracted attention when in our time was published in Paris in 1924 in a small print-run as part of Pound's modernist series through Three Mountains Press. Edmund Wilson described the writing as "of the first distinction", enough to bring attention to Hemingway,[61] and in the 1940s he wrote about "Big Two-Hearted River", "along with the mottled trout ... the boy from the American Middle West fishes up a nice little masterpiece."[62] When it was published in the United States, critics claimed Hemingway reinvigorated the short story by his use of declarative sentences and his crisp style.[63] In 1952, reviewing The Old Man and the Sea—for which Hemingway would win the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature—The New York Times said of "Big Two-Hearted River" that it was one the "best and happiest of his early short stories".[64]

In the 1970s, Carlos Baker wrote that the stories In Our Time were a remarkable achievement for a young writer;[65] and in 2004, Flora said of the story that "it is unquestionably the most brilliant of the collection In Our Time.[66] The story has become one of Hemingway's most anthologized stories,[37] and is one of a handful of stories to be an ongoing subject of literary criticism since its publication. It has become part of the 20th century American literary canon and ranks as one of the better American short stories along with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".[67]

According to Benson, although Hemingway was influenced by Pound and Joyce, he "carried the new form into the position of dominant influence" for much of the 20th century. Unlike other modernist writers, who wrote of man cut off from the past, Hemingway placed his narratives in the present and hence he became "the true modernist".[17]

References

Notes

  1. ^ Desnoyers, Megan Floyd. "Ernest Hemingway: A Storyteller's Legacy". JFK Library. Retrieved September 30, 2011
  2. ^ Baker (1972), 15–18
  3. ^ Oliver (1999), 168–169
  4. ^ Mellow (1992), 271
  5. ^ a b c Mellow (1992), 273–277
  6. ^ Reynolds (1989), 263, 271
  7. ^ Baker (1972), 410; Oliver (1999),169
  8. ^ Flora (2004), 41
  9. ^ Oliver (1999), 324
  10. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 179
  11. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 159
  12. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 164
  13. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 169
  14. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 172
  15. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 174
  16. ^ Meyers (1985), 74, 126
  17. ^ a b c Benson (1975), 285–287
  18. ^ a b Baker (1972), 117
  19. ^ qtd in Oliver (1999), 322
  20. ^ Oliver (1999), 321–322
  21. ^ Mellow (1992), 273
  22. ^ Mellow (1992), 272
  23. ^ qtd in Johnston (1984), 32
  24. ^ a b Flora (2004), 43
  25. ^ Smith (1996), 45
  26. ^ Wells (1975), 130–133
  27. ^ qtd in Berman (2007), 39
  28. ^ Johnston (1984), 31
  29. ^ Baker (1981), 122
  30. ^ qtd in Berman (2007), 39
  31. ^ Berman (2011), 11
  32. ^ qtd in Johnston (1984), 28–30
  33. ^ a b Berman (2011), 61
  34. ^ Berman (2007), 40
  35. ^ Johnston (1984), 31–32
  36. ^ Zapf (2005), 161
  37. ^ a b c Flora (2004), 42
  38. ^ Flora (2004), 44–45
  39. ^ Hemingway (1973 ed.), 179
  40. ^ Johnston (1984), 32–36
  41. ^ Flora (2004), 58
  42. ^ Flora (2004), 55
  43. ^ a b Young (1973), 8–9
  44. ^ a b Benson (1989), 350
  45. ^ Mellow (1992), 48–49
  46. ^ a b Mellow (1992), 57–60
  47. ^ Putnam, Thomas. "Hemingway on War and Its Aftermath". The National Archives. Retrieved November 30, 2011
  48. ^ Mellow (1992), 101
  49. ^ Johnston (1984), 35
  50. ^ Adair (1991), 586
  51. ^ qtd in Adair (1991), 585
  52. ^ Adair (1991), 586–587
  53. ^ Benson (1989), 351
  54. ^ qtd in Flora (2004), 43
  55. ^ Stoltzfus (2005), 215–218
  56. ^ Berman (2011), 66
  57. ^ Flora (2004), 44
  58. ^ Flora (2004), 51
  59. ^ Meyers (1985), 145
  60. ^ Flora (2004), 46
  61. ^ qtd in Wagner-Martin (2002), 4–5
  62. ^ Wilson (2005 edition), 9
  63. ^ Mellow (1992), 314
  64. ^ Davis, Robert Gorham (September 7, 1952). "Hemingway's Tragic Fisherman". The New York Times. Archived from the original on February 15, 2001. Retrieved June 26, 2012.
  65. ^ Baker (1972), 21
  66. ^ Flora (2004), 41
  67. ^ Beegel (1992), 3

Sources

  • Adair, William (1991). "Big Two-Hearted River": Why the Swamp is Tragic". Journal of Modern Literature. 17.1, 584–588
  • Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. Princeton: Princeton UP. ISBN 0-691-01305-5
  • Baker, Carlos (1981). Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-16765-7
  • Beegel, Susan (1992). "Introduction". in Beegel, Susan F. (ed). Hemingway's Neglected Short Fiction. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP. ISBN 0-8173-0586-6
  • Benson, Jackson (1975). "Ernest Hemingway as Short Story Writer". in Benson, Jackson (ed). The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-0320-5
  • Benson, Jackson (1989). "Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life". American Literature. 61.3, 354–358
  • Berman, Ronald (2007). "Hemingway's Michigan Landscapes". The Hemingway Review. 27.1, 39–54
  • Berman, Ronald (2011). Translating Modernism: Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP. ISBN 978-0-8173-5665-1
  • Flora, Joseph (2004) "Soldier Home: Big Two-Hearted River". in Bloom's Major Literary Characters: Nick Adams. New York: Chelsea House Press. ISBN 0-7910-7885-X
  • Hemingway, Ernest (1973 edition). "Big-Two Hearted River", in The Nick Adams Stories, Philip Young (ed). New York: Bantam
  • Johnston, Kenneth (1984). "Hemingway and Cézanne: Doing the Country". American Literature. 56.1, 28–37
  • Mellow, James (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 978-0-395-37777-3
  • Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4
  • Oliver, Charles (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2
  • Smith, Paul (1996). "1924: Hemingway's Luggage and the Miraculous Year". in Donaldson, Scott (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Cambridge UP. ISBN 978-0-521-45574-X
  • Stoltzfus, Ben (2005). "Sartre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories". Comparative Literature Studies. 42.3, 228–250
  • Reynolds, Michael (1989). Hemingway: The Paris Years. New York: Norton. ISBN 0-393-31879-6
  • Wells, Elizabeth J. (1975). "A Statistical Analysis of the Prose Style of Ernest Hemingway: Big Two-Hearted River". in Benson, Jackson (ed). The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham NC: Duke UP. ISBN 0-8223-0320-5
  • Wilson, Edmund (2005 edition). "Hemingway: Gauge of Morale". in Bloom, Harold (ed). Ernest Hemingway: Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 0-7910-8135-4
  • Young, Philip (1973). Ernest Hemingway. St. Paul: Minnesota UP. ISBN 0-8166-0191-7
  • Zapf, Hubert (2005). "Reflection vs. Daydream: Two Types of Implied Reader in Hemingway's Fiction". in Bloom, Harold (ed). Ernest Hemingway: Bloom's Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House. ISBN 0-7910-8135-4
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