Ernest Hemingway’s place in American letters seems guaranteed: a winner of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, Hemingway has long been a fixture in high school and college curricula. Just as influential as his famed economy of style and unflappable heroes, however, is his public persona. Hemingway helped create an image of a masculine ideal: sportsman, brawler, hard drinker, serial monogamist, and world traveler. Yet his iconicity has also worked against him. Because Hemingway is often dismissed by students and scholars alike for his perceived misogyny, instructors might find themselves wondering how to handle the impossibly over-determined author or even if they should include him on their syllabi at all.

In 1950, Ernest Hemingway was the most famous writer in the world, and he faced intense expectations for a masterwork to follow up his epic For Whom the Bell Tolls, published a decade earlier. The novel that emerged, Across the River and into the Trees, was a chronicle of the final days of the cantankerous American colonel Richard Cantwell, who spends his weekend leave in Venice hunting ducks, enjoying the city, and spending time with his beloved teenaged Italian contessa, Renata. This work elicited everything from full-throated praise to howls of derision and outrage. Sixty-five years later, it has been consigned to the margins of Hemingway’s legendary career.

In Hemingway’s Spain, Carl P. Eby and Mark Cirino collect thirteen penetrating and innovative essays by scholars of different nationalities, generations, and perspectives who explore Hemingway’s writing about Spain and his relationship to Spanish culture and ask us in a myriad of ways to rethink how Hemingway imagined Spain—whether through a modernist mythologization of the Spanish soil, his fascination with the bullfight, his interrogation of the relationship between travel and tourism, his involvement with Spanish politics, his dialog with Spanish writers, or his appreciation of the subtleties of Spanish values. In addition to fresh critical responses to some of Hemingway’s most famous novels and stories, a particular strength of Hemingway’s Spain is its consideration of neglected works, such as Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War stories and the novel The Dangerous Summer. The collection is noteworthy for its attention to how Hemingway’s post–World War II fiction revisits and reimagines his earlier Spanish works, and it brings new light both to Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War politics and his reception in Spain during the Franco years.

“I’ve been teaching Hemingway for more than two decades, and I can honestly say that this book will change the way that I introduce his work to my students.” —Stephen Trout, University of South Alabama

Teaching Hemingway and Modernism presents concrete, intertextual models for using Hemingway’s work effectively in various classroom settings, so students can understand the pertinent works, definitions, and types of avant-gardism that inflected his art. The fifteen teacher-scholars whose essays are included in the volume offer approaches that combine a focused individual treatment of Hemingway’s writing with clear links to the modernist era and offer meaningful assignments, prompts, and teaching tools.

The volume opens with an examination of Hemingway’s place in Cuban history and culture, evaluations of the man and his work, and studies of Hemingway’s life as an American in Cuba. These essays look directly at Hemingway’s Cuban experience, and they range from the academic to the journalistic, allowing different voices to speak and different tones to be heard. The first section includes reflections from Gladys Rodriguez Ferrero, former director of the Museo Finco Vigía, who describes the deep affection Cubans hold for Hemingway; and recollections from the now-adult members of “Gigi’s All Stars,” the boys’ baseball team that Hemingway organized in the 1940s.

Ernest Hemingway’s enlistment with the American Red Cross during World War I was one of the most formative experiences of his life, and it provided much of the source material for A Farewell to Arms and his writings about Italy and the Great War. As significant as it was, Hemingway’s service has never been sufficiently understood. By looking at previously unexamined documents, including the letters and diary of Hemingway’s commanding officer, Robert W. Bates, official reports of the ambulance and canteen services, and section newspapers published by volunteers, author Steven Florczyk provides crucial insights into Hemingway’s service.

Ernest Hemingway’s early adulthood (1917–1929) was marked by his work as a journalist, wartime service, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, artistic struggle, and spectacular success. In War + Ink, veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars, alongside experts in related fields, present pathbreaking research that provides important insights into this period of Hemingway’s life.

In Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, editors Suzanne del Gizzo and Frederic J. Svoboda have collected the best essays and reviews—pieces that examine the novel’s themes, its composition and structure, and the complex issue of editing a manuscript for posthumous publication—and placed them in a single, cohesive volume. Among the included works are E. L. Doctorow’s famous New York Times review “Braver Than We Thought,” a new essay by Tom Jenks examining his editing process in “Editing Hemingway: The Garden of Eden,” and Mark Spilka’s “Hemingway’s Barbershop Quintet: The Garden of Eden Manuscript,” a precursor to his groundbreaking study of Hemingway’s concerns with sex and gender roles, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny.

William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early-twentieth-century South. In Drawing First Blood, author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkner’s racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans, always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingway’s fascination with, and eventual push toward, the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche, and to challenge and unsettle it, too.