3 Review(s)

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 5, spanning 1932 through May 1934, traces the completion and publication of Death in the Afternoon and Winner Take Nothing. During this intensely active period, Hemingway hunts in Arkansas and Wyoming, fishes the waters off Key West and Cuba, revisits Madrid and Paris, and undertakes a long-anticipated African safari. He witnesses transitions at home and abroad: the deepening Great Depression, Prohibition-era rumrunning, revolution in Cuba, and political unrest in Spain. His readership and celebrity continue to expand as he begins writing for the new men's magazine Esquire. As the volume ends, Hemingway has just acquired his beloved boat, Pilar. The letters detail these events as well as his relationships with his family, friends, publishers, critics and literary contemporaries including editor Maxwell Perkins, Archibald MacLeish, John Dos Passos, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Together the letters paint an intimate self-portrait of this multi-faceted, self-confident, energetic artist in his prime.