Hemingway on Hunting

The companion volume to the
bestselling Hemingway on Fishing

Ernest Hemingway's lifelong zeal for the hunting life is reflected in his masterful works of fiction, from his famous account of an African safari in "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" to passages about duck hunting in Across the River and Into the Trees. For Hemingway, hunting was more than just a passion; it was a means through which to explore our humanity and man's relationship to nature. Courage, awe, respect, precision, patience -- these were the virtues that Hemingway honored in the hunter, and his ability to translate these qualities into prose has produced some of the strongest accounts of sportsmanship of all time.

Hemingway on Hunting offers the full range of Hemingway's writing about the hunting life. With selections from his best-loved novels and stories, along with journalistic pieces from such magazines as Esquire and Vogue, this spectacular collection is a must-have for anyone who has ever tasted the thrill of the hunt -- in person or on the page.

The longish short story The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" which is arguably his best short story is included. It tells the story of wealthy American and his beautiful wife on safari in Africa. The title character behaves shamefully during a lion hunt. That night, his wife sleeps with the white hunter to show her displeasure. The next day while hunting buffalo, he redeems himself and proves that he is not a coward, both to himself and to the onlookers. The short happy life of the title refers to that fact that soon after redeeming his injured manhood against the buffalo, his wife accidentally (or perhaps not accidentally) shoots him in the head as a wounded buffalo charges.

If you are a fan of Hemingway's you've probably read much of this stuff before elsewhere, the non-fiction pieces may be hardest to find elsewhere. This book makes a great gift for a hunting enthusiast who is not especially literary oriented.


eclectic ernest   June 15, 2006
kyod
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Bits and pieces from E.H. fiction and nonfiction that are hunting-related.For the outdoor enthusiast, reading the excerpts in this book will be more convenient than reading some of the original novels (e.g. Across the River...)
Hemingway was a great writer because of his ability to be very descriptive while still being economical with his words.Enjoyable read.


Hemingway on Hunting, Ernest Hemingway   May 16, 2007
woodnymph558 (Gautier, Ms)
0 out of 3 found this review helpful

It was good..but a bit long and sometimes it took several days
to read a chapter.


One for the book, but constellation for the author   March 24, 2002
Jerry hoffnagle (Brooklyn, NY United States)
8 out of 17 found this review helpful

As Hemingway the Zen master said, "Some are hunters, some are not." Several Hemingway scholars have treid to explain EH's lifelong affinity for blood sports (notably Bredahl and Drake's 1990 exegesis of Green Hills Of Africa) -- this "package of Papa" is content to just push whole chunks and raw excerpts of Hemingway onto a marketing skewer without any comment. Using "hunting" as a marketing criterion forces together the most flaccid posthumous Hemingway and some of his purest fiction and livliest reportage. It's obvious Hemingway wrote about hunting (and fishing) in the same sense the Homer wrote about Mediterranean tourism. Lazy readers may like the way this editor rearranged Hemingway's cabin furniture, but most of the writing actually seem the duller for being re-packaged to a less spontaneous purpose. Sad to see a great prose turned as a license for 'designer books,' and by his own kin. Some are artists, others are not.