Big Two-Hearted River: The Centennial Edition

(Hardback)

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Description

A gorgeous new centennial edition of Ernest Hemingways landmark short story of a veterans solo fishing trip in Michigans rugged Upper Peninsula, illustrated with specially commissioned artwork by master engraver Chris Wormell and featuring a revelatory foreword by John N. Maclean.

A century since its publication in the collectionIn Our Time, Big Two-Hearted River has helped shape language and literature in America and across the globe, and its magnetic pull continues to draw readers, writers, and critics. The story is the best early example of Ernest Hemingways now-familiar writing style: short sentences, punchy nouns and verbs, few adjectives and adverbs, and a seductive cadence. Easy to imitate, difficult to match. The subject matter of the story has inspired generations of writers to believe that fly fishing can be literature. More than any of his stories, it depends on his iceberg theory of literature, the notion that leaving essential parts of a story unsaid, the underwater portion of the iceberg, adds to its power. Taken in context with his other work, it marks Hemingways passage from boyish writer to accomplished author: nothing big came before it, novels and stories poured out after it. from the foreword by John N. Maclean

Reviews

"The finest story of the outdoors in American literature." Sports Illustrated "'Big Two-Hearted River'may be the finest piece of fiction ever written about the experience of the veteran." The Guardian "Some of the best English prose of the twentieth century." Larry McMurtry, The New York Review of Books "In Hemingway, fishing was always and infinitely metaphorical; Nick Adams plumbs the depths of his soul as he dangles a line." Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review A masterpiece, one of those rare instances when a superb writer reaches a level reserved only for those extraordinary talents with a nose for what is fundamental but not entirely clear and rational in human existence. Claremont Review of Books Ernest Hemingways Big Two-Hearted River retains its hold on me, some 40 years after my first reading. It is a story that can be recited and revealedlike currents in a beloved streamas fresh as each spring day. James F. Vesely, Seattle Times

Author Bio

Ernest Hemingway was one of America's foremost journalists and authors. A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize (1953) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1954), Hemingway is widely credited with driving a fundamental shift in prose writing in the early twentieth century. As an American expatriate in Paris in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway achieved international fame with such literary works as The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, which depicts his experience as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway died in 1961, leaving behind a rich literary legacy.