Big Two-Hearted River: The Centennial Edition

by Ernest Hemingway, John N. Maclean (Foreword by)

Overview

A gorgeous new centennial edition of Ernest Hemingway’s landmark short story of returning veteran Nick Adams’s solo fishing trip in Michigan’s rugged Upper Peninsula, illustrated with specially commissioned artwork by master engraver Chris Wormell and featuring a revelatory foreword by John N. Maclean.

"The finest story of the outdoors in American literature." —Sports Illustrated

A century since its publication in the collection In Our Time, “Big Two-Hearted River” has helped shape language and literature in America and across the globe, and its magnetic pull continues to draw readers, writers, and critics. The story is the best early example of Ernest Hemingway’s now-familiar writing style: short sentences, punchy nouns and verbs, few adjectives and adverbs, and a seductive cadence. Easy to imitate, difficult to match. The subject matter of the story has inspired generations of writers to believe that fly fishing can be literature. More than any of his stories, it depends on his ‘iceberg theory’ of literature, the notion that leaving essential parts of a story unsaid, the underwater portion of the iceberg, adds to its power. Taken in context with his other work, it marks Hemingway’s passage from boyish writer to accomplished author: nothing big came before it, novels and stories poured out after it. —from the foreword by John N. Maclean

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063297494
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/09/2023
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	120,919
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His novels include The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, he died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

John N. Maclean is the author of Home Waters, a memoir of his family’s four-generation connection to Montana’s Blackfoot River, which his father, Norman Maclean, made famous in A River Runs through It. He spent thirty years at the Chicago Tribune, then wrote five nonfiction books about wildland fire that are considered a staple of fire literature. Maclean, an avid fly fisherman, lives in Washington, DC, and at a family cabin in Montana.

Date of Birth:

July 21, 1899

Date of Death:

July 2, 1961

Place of Birth:

Oak Park, Illinois

Place of Death:

Ketchum, Idaho

Editorial Reviews

"The finest story of the outdoors in American literature." — Sports Illustrated

"'Big Two-Hearted River' may be the finest piece of fiction ever written about the experience of the veteran." — The Guardian

"Matchlessly eloquent in its evocation of the pleasures of the senses and of the feeling of place. ... In 'Big Two-Hearted River,' there are moments that are not just constructed like a Cézanne painting; they look like a Cézanne painting." — Adam Gopnick, The New Yorker

"Some of the best English prose of the twentieth century." — Larry McMurtry, The New York Review of Books

"In Hemingway, fishing was always and infinitely metaphorical; Nick Adams plumbs the depths of his soul as he dangles a line." — Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review

“A masterpiece, one of those rare instances when a superb writer reaches a level reserved only for those extraordinary talents with a nose for what is fundamental but not entirely clear and rational in human existence.”  — Claremont Review of Books

“Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ retains its hold on me, some 40 years after my first reading. It is a story that can be recited and revealed—like currents in a beloved stream—as fresh as each spring day.”  — James F. Vesely, Seattle Times

From the Publisher

They are a highly readable feast, these 172 articles written by Hemingway for the Toronto Star between early 1920 and late 1924. They range from amusing sketches of everyday life in Toronto to firsthand and sometimes quite lengthly reports on the social and political scene in postwar Europe. Whether the subjects are Lloyd George's visit to Canada, the behavior of women at prize-fights, Christmas in Paris, bullfighting in Pamplona, France's political woes, Mussolini's Fascists or Toronto's young Communists, the pieces invariably exhibit Hemingway's expertise at digging out the facts, his uncanny grasp of dialogue and his shining simplicity of style. They also contain a surprisingly strong element of humor. Here is Hemingway ironically knowing, skilled in his craft and very wide awake, a literary apprentice who hardly seems an apprentice. November 18

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Hemingway undervalued his journal ism, insisting it was ``timely rather than permanent.'' But many of the 172 arti cles he wrote for the Toronto Star merit attention and admiration. On assign ment in post-war Europe, Hemingway observed and absorbed many of the subjects (war and love, courage and sham, cruelty and injustice) that were to shape his fiction. His prose style also began to assume its distinctive rhythms and diction. Several of these dispatches would reappear,shrewdly altered, as vi gnettes in In Our Time (the thrill of trout and tuna fishing; the conscious ness of bullfighting as more than sport``a very great tragedy''). In By - line: Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, 1967), William White included only 29 of these pieces. The full edition is most welcome. Arthur Waldhorn, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY

Library Journal

If you are a fly fisherman or have a fly fisherman in your life, this early Hemingway short story is a must-listen. Kyle Soller transports the listener to an out-of-the-way river in Michigan where one can practically hear the water flowing, the insects buzzing, and the wind whispering through the trees. Soller never tries to do too much with his narration of this brief story of a young man who is trying to find peace in the backwoods. Instead, he lets Hemingway's words paint such a glorious picture that even those who don't fly-fish will want to grab a rod and reel and try to land big trout. J.P.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2023 - AudioFile