In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway speaks of sitting in a cafe in Paris and writing about what he knew best -- and when it came time to stop, he "did not want to leave the river." The story was the unforgettable classic, "Big Two-Hearted River," and from its first words we do not want to leave the river either. He also wrote articles for the Toronto Star on fishing in Canada and Europe and, later, articles for Esquire about his growing passion for big-game fishing. His last books, The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in the Stream, celebrate his vast knowledge of the ocean and his affection for its great denizens.
Hemingway on Fishing is an encompassing, diverse, and fascinating collection. From the early Nick Adams stories and the memorable chapters on fishing the Irati River in The Sun Also Rises to such late novels as Islands in the Stream, this collection traces the evolution of a great writer's passion; the range of his interests; the sure use he made of fishing, transforming it into the stuff of great literature. Anglers and lovers of great writing alike will welcome this important collection.
He wrote beautifully about fishing....It is wonderful to see the good stuff again and to be reminded of just how good it was. —American Way magazine
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. As part of the expatriate community in 1920s Paris, the former journalist and World War I ambulance driver began a career that led to international fame. Hemingway was an aficionado of bullfighting and big-game hunting, and his main protagonists were always men and women of courage and conviction who suffered unseen scars, both physical and emotional. He covered the Spanish Civil War, portraying it in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he also covered World War II. His classic novella The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He died in 1961.
During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.
Hemingway -- himself a great sportsman -- liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961.
© The Nobel Foundation 1954.
A Brief Fisherman's Chronology xi
Foreword Jack Hemingway xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction Nick Lyons xix
I From up in Michigan to the Pyrenées
Big Two-Hearted River: Part I 3
Big Two-Hearted River: Part II 13
The End of Something 25
The Last Good Country (an excerpt) 31
Now I Lay Me 37
From A Moveable Feast … "Fishermen of the Seine" 47
From The Sun Also Rises … "On the Irati" 51
From A Moveable Feast … "The River" 75
From Green Hills of Africa … "Three Big Trout" 77
From Green Hills of Africa … "The Stream" 79
II Dispatches from Various Waters-The Soo to the Great Blue River
The Best Rainbow Trout Fishing-Toronto Star Weekly, August 28, 1920 83
Tuna Fishing in Spain-Toronto Star Weekly, February 18, 1922 87
Fishing the Rhone Canal-Toronto Daily Star, June 10, 1922 89
Trout Fishing in Europe-Toronto Star Weekly, November 17, 1923 93
Marlin Off the Morro: A Cuban Letter-Esquire, Autumn 1933 99
Out in the Stream: A Cuban Letter-Esquire, August 1934 107
On Being Shot Again: A Gulf Stream Letter-Esquire, June 1935 115
On the Blue Water: A Gulf Stream Letter-Esquire, April 1936 123
The Clark's Fork Valley, Wyoming-Vogue, February 1939 133
The Great Blue River-Holiday, July 1949 137
"A Situation Report" (an excerpt)-Look, September 4,1956 151
III The Sea-Respite and Ultimate Challenge
From The Garden of Eden 155
From Islands in the Stream 163
From The Old Man and the Sea 201
Selected Bibliography 235
A priceless collection of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s writing about angling.
From childhood on, Ernest Hemingway was a passionate fisherman. He fished the lakes and creeks near the family’s summer home at Walloon Lake, Michigan, and his first stories and reportage were often about his favorite sport. Here, collected for the first time in one volume, are all of Papa’s great writings about the many kinds of fishing he enjoyed—from trout in the rivers of northern Michigan to marlin in the Gulf Stream. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway speaks of sitting in a cafe in Paris and writing about what he knew best—and when it came time to stop, he “did not want to leave the river”; the story was the unforgettable classic, “Big Two-Hearted River,” and from its first words we do not want to leave the river either. He wrote articles for the Toronto Star on fishing in Canada and Europe and, later, articles for Esquire about his growing passion for big-game fishing. And, of course, in such classic novels as The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway transformed his love of fishing and his vast knowledge of the ocean into great American literature.
Hemingway on Fishing is a diverse and fascinating collection of the great novelist’s writing about fishing. From the early Nick Adams stories and the memorable chapters on fishing the Irati River in The Sun Also Rises to such late novels as Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden, this collection traces the evolution of a great writer’s passion and how it influenced his life’s work. Anglers and lovers of great writing alike will relishthis landmark collection.
Anonymous
Posted April 3, 2001
Something's definitely lost in the re-arrangement of Hemingway work around the word 'fish' to provide a smarmy assurance for a 'hobby class': why not read the real things teh way EH arranged them? There's plenty of good criticism about EH and the outdoors (he clearly preferred hunting). Gathering EH's saltwater reporting/ journalism stuff is a service (and shows EH really WAS a marlin-bullfighter)... but really, this is fish-hatchery Hemingway.
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Overview
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway speaks of sitting in a cafe ...