I picked up The Short Stories of Ernest Hemmingway because I wanted to read a couple short stories he had written about his time in East Africa. It was Hemmingway’s sons Patrick and Sean who compiled the stories and published them in 2017. Ernest wrote “The Art of the Short Story” in 1959 from Malaga, Spain where he was staying at the time.
I must write that I’ve never been a big fan of Hemmingway although I was greatly enamored by The Old Man and the Sea, but his other novels just left me unimpressed. The two short stories that drew my attention were The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Those stories were suggested by my brother-in-law, a literature professor emeritus. Hemmingway certainly captured the dysfunctional and unhappy marriage of the Macombers. While the setting was in East Africa and hunting game was an important part of the action, I was left feeling quite flat after the story ended. The second short story just seemed dated and rather uninteresting in a current day light.
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