Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway, The

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, May 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.