Green Hills of Africa
Ernest Hemingway (1935)

THE A5 BOOK REVIEW

While Ernest Hemingway is of course most famous for his novels, he also experimented with travel writing.  Green Hills of Africa is an evocative book published in 1935 describing a month-long big game hunting safari he took with his wife, Pauline Marie Pfeiffer, in East Africa.  It is one of the better examinations into hunting, with an intimate view into the primal nature and grace of the hunt, and the beauty of the African plains.  The auto-biographical account is perfect for those curious to learn more about Hemingway’s character, for better or worse; the writing reveals his competitiveness with other hunters, his masochism, and some of his opinions of other writers.  
Click here to see reviews and prices for this book.

OTHER A5 RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS - ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Ernest Hemingway is of course an amazing writer, known for his adventurous lifestyle, his love of bull fighting, and for several classics in American literature.   He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.  Click here to learn more about Ernest Hemingway.

GREAT QUOTES:

“All I wanted to do was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie, listening, homesick for it already. Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting."
- Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

"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."
- Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

INTERESTING LINKS:

  • Read this 1935 not-so-favorable review from the New York Times on Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa.
  • The longest sentence Hemingway ever wrote, 424 words, was in Green Hills of Africa.  See the sentence at this article on “15 Bizarre Facts About Ernest Hemingway”.