Green Hills of Africa - (Hemingway Library Edition) by Ernest Hemingway

About the Book

Hemingway's well-documented fascination with big-game hunting is magnificently captured amidst rich descriptions of the beauty and strangeness of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. An impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape, this immediate and deeply felt account has all of the hallmarks of the most evocative travel writing.

Book Synopsis

The most intimate and elaborately enhanced addition to the Hemingway Library series: Hemingway's memoir of his safari across the Serengeti--presented with archival material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library, and with the never-before-published safari journal of Hemingway's second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer.

First published in 1935, Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical account of his safari in the great game country of East Africa with his wife Pauline. Hemingway's fascination with big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative narrative of his trip. In examining the poetic grace of the chase, and the ferocity of the kill, Hemingway looks inward, seeking to explain the lure of the hunt and the primal undercurrent that comes alive on the plains of Africa. Green Hills of Africa is also an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape, and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man. Hemingway's rich description of the land and his passion for hunting combine to give Green Hills of Africa the immediacy of a deeply felt individual experience that is the hallmark of the greatest travel writing.

This new Hemingway Library Edition offers a fresh perspective on Hemingway's classic travelogue with a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, the author's sole surviving son, who, himself, spent many years as a professional hunter in East Africa; a new introduction by Seán Hemingway, grandson of the author; and published for the first time in its entirety the African journal of Hemingway's wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, which provides new insight into the experiences that shaped her husband's craft.

Review Quotes

"[An] account of a hunting safari on the Serengeti Plains, a chronicle of adventure and a literary challenge Hemingway set up for himself. Anticipating by decades Truman Capote's 'nonfiction novel, ' the classic 'In Cold Blood, ' Hemingway wanted to prove that 'an absolutely true book' can 'compete with a work of the imagination.'"--Hillel Italie, Associated Press

"[Hemingway's wife, Pauline's] engaging, laconic observations offer yet another lens through which to witness Hemingway at large in the world, while also helping the reader gauge how much, or how little, Hemingway reshaped the reality of his experiences in order to express, to his own satisfaction, his fondness for the hunt, his affinity for the natural world, and his abiding love of 'the dark continent' itself....With its journal entries, an insightful foreword, and a moving introduction by Hemingway's sons, and some charming 'letters from Africa' that Hemingway published in Esquire...the reissue of this book is an opportunity, a reminder, to dive in again to a title we probably haven't thought about for years....Encountering the book again after all these years, it's hard not to marvel, page after page, at Hemingway's singular gift for pure, descriptive prose."-- "The Daily Beast"

"The true joy lies in reading in Hemingway's prose again: precise, lyrical, unwinding in long sentences, suggesting more than it reveals, sumptuous in its descriptions of the valleys, ravines, salt-licks, hills and forests of his beloved Africa. What I really want to do is quote great swaths of his style at its most beautiful, hypnotic and expert."-- "Sam Coale, Providence Journal"

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.