Salem Press

Magill's Survey of American Literature offers profiles of major U.S. and Canadian writers accompanied by analyses of their significant works in fiction, drama, poetry, and nonfiction. Below is an excerpt from the Survey's essay on Ernest Hemingway.

Ernest Hemingway
Ever seeking new adventures, Hemingway took his first African safari in 1933-1934; during these travels he also revisited Spain and France. His Green Hills of Africa, published in 1935, resulted fromthis, his first of many African ventures. Back in KeyWest after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1938, Hemingway was restless, and in 1939, he bought a house, called Finca Vigia, outside Havana, Cuba, and moved there.

Hemingway's obsession with adventure and with proving his masculinity-clear motivations for many of his more daring adventures-made him difficult to live with; in 1940, Pauline divorced him. In the same year, For Whom the Bell Tolls was published, and Hemingway married newswoman Martha Gellhorn, several years his senior, whom he regarded subconsciously as a mother figure, as he may have done all his wives. His resentment of his own mother is often said to have manifested itself in his marriages, directed against the women he chose to marry.

With the entry of the United States into World War II, Hemingway again went to Europe as a war correspondent. He participated in the Allied Normandy invasion, hatched a personal scheme to liberate Paris, and attached himself to the Fourth Infantry Division, somewhat against the will of its officers. When Hemingway returned to Cuba during the war, he became a self-appointed antisubmarine operative, sailing into the ocean on his yacht to spot enemy submarines and disable any he encountered.

The U.S. government was embarrassed by Hemingway's unsolicited help. His literary production declined during this period, and his drinking was out of control. When Martha Gellhorn divorced him in 1944, he quickly married Mary Welsh, who would remain his wife until Hemingway, seeking the same solution to his problems that his father had earlier, committed suicide in 1961.

- R. Baird Shuman