Green Hills of Africa
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Green Hills of Africa is a 1935 work of nonfiction written by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway's second work of nonfiction, Green Hills of Africa is basically a journal of a month on safari he and his wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, took in East Africa during December 1933.
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[edit] Background
The majority of the journal, when not describing his actual hunting in the East African landscape, Hemingway comments repeatedly on his reading and writing - giving his opinions freely on authors such as Tolstoy, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Dostoevsky (pages 70-71). Much of the East African landscape Hemingway describes takes places in the region of Lake Manyara in Tanzania.
The Green Hills of Africa safari was the first of two African safaris Hemingway took in his life. The second safari was in 1953-1954, and was fictionalized in True at First Light). In addition to inspiring Green Hills of Africa, the first safari also was the impetus for the two short stories "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro". It was originally serialized in Scribner's Magazine, from May to November of 1935.
[edit] Literary analysis
The foreword of Green Hills of Africa immediately identifies this as a work of nonfiction that should be compared with similar works of fiction:
- "Unlike many novels, none of the characters or incidents in this book is imaginary. Any one not finding sufficient love interest is at liberty, while reading it, to insert whatever love interest he or she may have at the time. The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month's action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination."
The book is well known today for a line that has nearly nothing to do with its subject. This quote is frequently used as evidence that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is The Great American Novel:
- "The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers.... All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
One of the key themes in Green Hills of Africa are Hemingway's conversations with an Austrian named Kandisky, who Hemingway stops to help when Kandisky's truck breaks down. After initially trading opinions on German writers like Rilke and Heinrich Mann, Hemingway and the Austrian later discuss American literature over dinner (pages 19-24), and it turns out that one of the few American writers Hemingway approves of is Henry James, whom he mentions twice.
Specifically, Hemingway says that “The good American writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain” and adds later that “Henry James wanted to make money. He never did, of course” (page 24). Intermixed with these comments on James, Crane, and Twain are Hemingway’s views of American writers in general, most of whom, he says, came to a bad end. When Kandisky asks, “And you?”, Hemingway replies:
- "I am interested in other things. I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.” “And what do you want?” “To write as well as I can and learn as I go along. At the same time I have my life which I enjoy and which is a damned good life."
[edit] Popular culture
In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, there is a book called The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, written by the dwarf Hemet Nesingwary (his name is an anagram of Hemingway's), who leads a hunting expedition in Stranglethorn Vale. The pages of the book can be found everywhere in the jungle.
[edit] References
- The Hemingway Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, Spring 2003. Copyright © 2003 The Ernest
Hemingway Foundation. Published by the University of Idaho Press,Moscow, Idaho. (Jungman, Robert & Tabor, Carole. Henry James on Safari in Ernest Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa. Louisiana Tech University.)
- Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. 1935. Rpt. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0-684-80129-9
- James, Henry. The Ambassadors. 2 vols. The New York Edition. Rpt. New York: Augustus Kelley,
1971.
- The World of Warcraft Wiki, Hemet Nesingwary, http://www.wowwiki.com/Hemet_Nesingwary, May 2008
