Before he gained wide fame as a novelist, Ernest Hemingway established his literary reputation with his short stories. Set in the varied landscapes of Spain, Africa, and the American Midwest, this definitive audio collection traces the development and maturation of Hemingway's distinct and revolutionary storytelling style -- from the plain bald language of his first story to his mastery of seamless prose that contained a spare, eloquent pathos, as well as a sense of expansive solitude. These stories showcase the singular talent of a master, the most important American writer of the twentieth century.

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years later he completed the greatest novel to emerge from "the good fight," For Whom the Bell Tolls. The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise. "If the function of a writer is to reveal reality," Maxwell Perkins wrote Hemingway after reading the manuscript, "no one ever so completely performed it." Greater in power, broader in scope, and more intensely emotional than any of the author's previous works, it stands as one of the best war novels of all time.

This Literary Life tells the story of Hemingway the writer by concentrating on four periods of his best work, shaped in part by study of the correspondence between him and his four wives--and in the case of Mary Welsh, his last wife, of her diary and her autobiography. Focus falls on the Hadley Richardson period (In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises), the Pauline Pfeiffer years (A Farewell to Arms), the Martha Gellhorn period (For Whom the Bell Tolls) and the last (The Old Man and the Sea).

Ernest Hemingway - 14 Books
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
A Day's Wait 
A Farewell To Arms
Across the River and into the Trees
Big Two-Hearted River
For Whom The Bell Tolls
Garden Of Eden
Green Hills of Africa
Islands In The Stream
Men Without Women
The Killers 
The Old Man and the Sea
The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
The Sun Also Rises