Big Two-Hearted River: The Centennial Edition

Description

A gorgeous new centennial edition of Ernest Hemingway's landmark short story of a veteran'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. "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

Ernest Hemingway was one of America's foremost journalists and authors. A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954), Hemingway is widely credited with driving a fundamental shift in prose writing in the early twentieth century. As an American expatriate in Paris in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway achieved international fame with such literary works as The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, which depicts his experience as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway died in 1961, leaving behind a rich literary legacy.

"One of the best and happiest of [Hemingway's] early short stories." - New York Times "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." - Seattle Times "A master class on war trauma and prose restraint." - National 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 "Its art is in the clarity of its details, its freshness and simplicity, and an effortless immediacy in the writing. It is no disparagement of Hemingway's later work to say that he never wrote so well again: no one ever wrote better in this particular field." - Sports Illustrated