Ernest Hemingway Best Collection: The Old Man and The Sea, The Sun Also Rises and For Whom the Bell Tolls

by Ernest Hemingway

BEST ERNEST HEMINGWAY COLLECTION

The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal -- a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Here Hemingway recasts, in strikingly contemporary style, the classic theme of courage in the face of defeat, of personal triumph won from loss. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novella confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from “the good fight,” and one of the foremost classics of war literature in history.

Published in 1940, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. Robert Jordan is a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain. In his portrayal of Jordan’s love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo’s last stand, Hemingway creates a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. “If the function of a writer is to reveal reality,” Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, “no one ever so completely performed it.” Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author’s previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway’s spare but powerful writing style. It celebrates the art and craft of Hemingway’s quintessential story of the Lost Generation.

A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway’s most unforgettable Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions. First published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is “an absorbing, beautifully and tenderly absurd, heartbreaking narrative...a truly gripping story, told in lean, hard, athletic prose” (The New York Times).

489 pages, Paperback

Published February 14, 2022

About the author

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a journalist and which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh Hemingway in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, on July 2, 1961 (a couple weeks before his 62nd birthday), he killed himself using one of his shotguns.

Reviews

[Celine Kaye · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading Hemingway's collection of novels surprisingly. For The Old Man and the Sea, reading about Santiago and the young boy was fascinating as it explored the old man's sacrifices to catch a fish after years of the old man not being able to catch an fish. But, as the old man fishes, the old man ultimately shows his sacrifice to the boy who followed him despite his father's opposition. In the end, after the fisherman's long fight and multiple days spent to gain that fish, they ultimately get the largest fish he ever fished, an mako shark. Then, for The Sun Also Rises, reading about the journey of Jake Barnes, Robert Cohn, Bill, and Lady Brett Ashley was fascinating because it revealed not only the nature of Paris and Spain but also each individual character. Through Cohn, we learn that Cohn's trip to Europe and joining of a literary set challenges 1920s antisemitism and Brett Asshley of the morality of the 1920s avant-garde set. Lastly, in For Whom the Bell Tolls, reading about the Spanish Civil War was initially a bit boring as it primarily sets up Robert Jordan's relationships with other guerillas but as the characters get closer and closer to El Sordo, the action has higher stakes as Jordan and Maria fall in love as the Nationalists take over.