Green Hills of Africa

Description

A powerful and beautiful account of Hemingway's experiences in Africa and his hunt for big game, from the Nobel Prize winning author of A Farewell to Arms. 'I remember seeing the lion looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby-looking tree in a patch of orchard bush and P. O. M. kneeling to shoot him. Then there was the short-barrelled explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going to the left on a run, a strange, heavy-shouldered, foot-swinging cat run. I hit him with the Springfield and he went down...' Returning to his love of the African continent and its wildlife, Hemingway captures brilliantly the thrill and excitement of the hunt for big game. In some of the most vivid, intense and evocative travel writing, and memoir of his career, he describes the vastness of Africa and the brutality of its 'sports', showing even in this slim volume why he was one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield - this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war - in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

A fine book on death in the African afternoon. . .The writing is the thing; that way he has of getting down with beautiful precision the exact way things look, smell, taste, feel, sound * New York Times * If he were never to write again, his name would live as long as the English language, for Green Hills of Africa takes its place beside his other works on that small shelf in our libraries which we reserve for the classics * Observer * This book is an expression of a deep enjoyment and appreciation of being alive - in Africa. There is more to it than hunting; it is the feeling of the dew on the grass in the morning, the shape and colour and smell of the country, the companionship of friends ... and the feeling that time has ceased to matter * TLS *