Encyclopedic and lively, this book illuminates the basic facts associated with the more than 2,500 fictional and historical people, animals, events and cultural artifacts which appear in Hemingway's nine novels. Hemingway advertised himself as an authority on sport and war, but his interests were much broader. He studied the literary, political, and popular cultures of the many countries he lived in (Cuba, France, United States) and visited regularly (Spain, Germany, Austria, Italy, eastern Africa). His novels reveal his erudition: They are studded with often arcane references to art,...

Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon reveals its author at the height of his intellectual and stylistic powers. By that time, Hemingway had already won critical and popular acclaim for his short stories and novels of the late twenties. A mature and self-confident artist, he now risked his career by switching from fiction to nonfiction, from American characters to Spanish bullfighters, from exotic and romantic settings to the tough world of the Spanish bullring, a world that might seem frightening and even repellant to those who do not understand it. Hemingway's nonfiction has been denied...

Hemingway's two extended African safaris, the first in the 1930s and the second in the 1950s, gave rise to two of his best-known stories (-The Snows of Kilimanjaro- and -The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber-), a considerable amount of journalism and correspondence, and two nonfiction books, Green Hills of Africa (1935), about the first safari, and True at First Light (1999; longer version, Under Kilimanjaro 2005), about the second. Africa also figures largely in his important posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986). The variety and quantity of this literary output indicate clearly that...

Hemingway's letters, many previously unpublished, trace his rise to international renown providing a rich account of the artist (April 1929-1931).