The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899, the second of six children. In 1917, he joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris, associating with other expatriates like Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.

Hemingway's early stories told in his distinctive style. 'When she goes, he though. I'll have all I want. Not all I want but all there is' In these early Hemingway stories, which are partly autobiographical, men and women of passion live, fight, love and die in scenes of dramatic intensity. They range from haunting tragedy on the snow-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, to brutal America with its deceptive calm, and war-ravaged Europe 'An excellent story-teller, intense and skilful in planning and bringing off his effects' Daily Telegraph