Ernest Hemingway

It's hard to imagine, but Hemingway's magnum opus was originally tiled Fiesta and was actually published as such in the U.K.: a party could hardly be farther from the manic cycles of depression and forced euphoria that Papa so lovingly subjects his Lost Generation characters to. One imagines him saying it with a resigned, downtrodden air, this fiesta being one in which an impotent man loses his masculine girlfriend to a young... Spanish bullfighter. By whatever name, The Sun Also Rises is a singular book. What sets it apart aside from the gender-bending, the show-stopping portrait of pre-war Spain, and the catatonic understatement throughout is the remarkable intimacy Hemingway sustains across the book's numerous key characters. That alone would be mastery enough, but Hemingway goes us one better, conjuring this intimacy out of the barest of prose, certainly the best available example of the author's noted "iceberg" theory. It's also a very strange book, with Brett (the masculine girlfriend) as one of Hemingway's most enigmatic characters, (the most outstanding example of Hemingway's "bitch women," as one critic called her). Likewise, her scorned lover, Jake, has been taken for Hemingway himself, a pure sublimation of all the fears of emasculation and impotence that would dog him for life. What ties it all together is the very true depiction of the quiet suffering amidst the party life of interwar Paris that has come to define Hemingway's generation. It's a brisk, discordant read, certainly Hemingway's best. As an added audio bonus, the perfectly sculpted dialog sings in William Hurt's spot-on narration.

In a very literal sense, For Whom the Bell Tolls is about a man who needs to blow up a bridge; but in an equally real sense, it's about a man who needs to come to terms with death. Quiet American hero and all-around badass Robert Jordan travels to Spain to wage the good war with the Republicans against the Fascists, and he is sent on a virtual suicide mission deep into... the mountains to detonate a key bridge. In the four days that follow, he falls in love, drinks a lot of wine, and makes peace with his maker. For Whom the Bell Tolls may be Hemingway's tautest war novel the famous scene of mass execution in the beautiful Ronda alone is worth the price of admission and also, linguistically, his strangest. His use of the word thou to mimic the Spanish tu has been widely discussed, as has his use of purposely archaic language to make his English sound foreign. It all gets a little too close to self-parody when Hemingway translates his foul-mouthed Spaniards' constant refrain "me cago en la leche" as "I obscenity in the milk," yet in the end the weirdness only serves to make Hemingway's account of the Spanish Civil War that much more compelling. Perhaps the only writer who could pull off such awkwardly translated vulgarity, he does it with a brio that meshes brilliantly with his typically spare prose, delivering a war novel that is at once touching, red-blooded, poignant, and, fundamentally, existentially black.

Few authors loved the hard, sad ending as much as Hemingway did, and he certainly was at his hardest and saddest in this book. Ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with nurse Catherine Barkley amidst the collapse of the Italian army at Caporetto during World War I. Heeding love over duty, he deserts, avoids execution by the slimmest of margins, and escapes with Catherine to Switzerland. After an idyllic several months,... Catherine goes into labor with their baby and Hemingway delivers his soul-flooring ending. At once a study of one man's very personal tragedy against the anonymity of tragedy of a world war, a muscular and masculine love story, and a sort of prequel to The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms depicts war at its most existentially absurd. It also offers the chance to experience one of the most famous last lines in all of literature. In an oft-quoted interview with The Paris Review he claims to have written that ending some 30 times before getting it right, but get it right he did.

Hemingway famously took his own life in 1961 after becoming a broken, depressed man were it not for this book, he might have done so 10 years earlier. Credited for earning Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize, this allegorical tale might just be the greatest comeback novel of all time. After the grand failure that was the disastrous Across the River and into the Trees, Hemingway was about to turn in his typewriter... instead he hammered out this taut story of an aged fisherman who has gone nearly three months without a single catch. Hooking a huge marlin after 85 days of failure, Santiago battles it for two days and two nights yet it is only after he catches his longed-for prey that Hemingway takes the book into entirely new territory. Critics have long drawn associations between Santiago and Hemingway, as well as the vast sea and the author's roiling unconscious, yet despite the consensus on some things, few books in Hemingway's body of work have inspired such hot debates. Is the book the perfect, fable-like distillation of Hemingway's style, or an overwrought exoticization of a Cuban fisherman? Perhaps in the end The Old Man and the Sea is a little of both, which only makes it that much more necessary. Read it to see Hemingway's final word on manhood a question that he wrestled with for his entire life as well as to see close up what might be called "elevated" Hemingway: the late, baroque style of a literary giant who knows he has nearly reached the end of his career.

Forget the fact that this book is the biggest nostalgia-fest ever and that Hemingway is lying through his teeth when he claims as a young man in Paris, "I was poor and very happy" (perhaps he was happy, but this trust-fund baby was not poor); read it simply because it is the most perfect, most idealized depiction of a youthful writer that you will ever see. It's all the more poignant when... you consider that Hemingway wrote this book about his very happy, very young memories of Paris while he was a very unhappy, very old man living in Idaho and Cuba. There are sublime passages here about nothing more complex than watching Paris wake up in the bohemian Saint Germain neighborhood, seeing fishermen pull their daily catch from the Seine, and enjoying the simple pleasure of one's first meal in two days. Juxtaposed with these nave passages is the subtle score-settling of a man who has become a literary giant: the gentle toppling of his mentor Gertrude Stein, a surprisingly fair image of Ezra Pound, and a merciless account of a drink with Ford Maddox Ford ("I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room"). Most of all, this book should be read for its depiction of the romantic writer's life, surely embellished beyond belief, but sounding all the better for it: "Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know."

Needless to say, Hemingway's sudden suicide left his literary estate in great disarray, prompting a flood of posthumous releases. (One count totaled more than 300 unpublished manuscripts at the time of his death.) Although many of these releases have been curiosities rightly swept beneath the sands of time, The Nick Adams Stories have, thankfully, endured. These 24 stories first published together in 1972 offer a version of Hemingway known as Nick Adams.... Arranged chronologically to follow Nick's life, they offer a rare look into Hemingway's early twentieth-century middle America, which makes a fine comparison to his better-known accounts of Europe. Rather than Hemingway's familiar revolutionaries and Lost Generation Parisians here we see rail-riding hobos, Chicago gangsters, and, of course, one Nick Adams, trying to come to terms with the chaos and emptiness of a rural America turning modern. Set mostly in the still-unsettled upper Michigan, these stories can be grisly, as with "Three Shots" where a Native American wife gets a C-section, only to have her own throat slit by her husband. Yet others, like "Big Two-Hearted River," are in the best tradition of Hemingway's stoic pastoralism, where the titular river allows Hemingway to elegant portray the dark recesses of Nick's mind. Another standout is "The Killers," which charts Nick's abrupt coming-of-age during a Chicago gangland murder and about which Hemingway himself said, "That story probably had more left out of it than anything I ever wrote." While not quite as good as Hemingway's wartime novels, this solid, satisfying collection nonetheless fills a gap in the writer's oeuvre and has let a few more of Papa's short masterpieces see the light of day.