Publisher's Preface

There has long been a need for a complete and up-to-date edition of the shortstories of Ernest Hemingway. Until now the only such volume was the omnibuscollection of the first forty-nine stories published in 1938 together withHemingway's play The Fifth Column. That was a fertile period ofHemingway's writing and a number of stories based on his experiences in Cubaand Spain were appearing in magazines, but too late to have been included in"The First Forty-nine."

In 1939 Hemingway was already considering a new collection of stories thatwould take its place beside the earlier books In Our Time, Men WithoutWomen, and Winner Take Nothing. On February 7 he wrote from his homein Key West to his editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribners suggesting such a book.At that time he had already completed five stories: "The Denunciation," "TheButterfly and the Tank," "Night Before Battle," "Nobody Ever Dies," and"Landscape with Figures," which is published here for the first time. A sixthstory, "Under the Ridge," would appear shortly in the March 1939 edition ofCosmopolitan.

As it turned out, Hemingway's plans for that new book did not pan out. He hadcommitted himself to writing three "very long" stories to round out thecollection (two dealing with battles in the Spanish Civil War and one about theCuban fisherman who fought a swordfish for four days and four nights only tolose it to sharks). But once Hemingway got underway on his novel -- later published as For Whom the Bell Tolls -- all other writing projects werelaid aside. We can only speculate on the two war stories he abandoned, but itis probable that much of what they mighthrs in the history of literature, and his stories taken as a whole present a world of experience. In 1918 he signed up for ambulance duty in Italy as a member of an American Field Service unit. It was his first transatlantic journey and he was eighteen at the time. On the day of his arrival in Milan a munitions factory blew up, and with the other volunteers in his contingent Hemingway was assigned to gather up the remains of the dead. Only three months later he was badly wounded in both legsand hospitalized in the American Red Cross hospital in Milan, with subsequentoutpatient treatment. These wartime experiences, including the people he met,provided many details for his novel of World War I, A Farewell to Arms.They also inspired five short story masterpieces.

In the 1920s he revisited Italy several times; sometimes as a professionaljournalist and sometimes for pleasure. His short story about a motor trip witha friend through Mussolini's Italy, "Che Ti Dice La Patria?," succeeds inconveying the harsh atmosphere of a totalitarian regime.

Between 1922 and 1924 Hemingway made several trips to Switzerland to gathermaterial for The Toronto Star. His subjects included economic conditionsand other practical subjects, but also accounts of Swiss winter sports:bobsledding, skiing, and the hazardous luge. As in other fields, Hemingway wasahead of his compatriots in discovering places and pleasures that would becometourist attractions. At the same time, he was storing up ideas for a number ofhis short stories, with themes ranging from the comic to the serious and themacabre.

Hemingway attended his first bullfight, in the company of American friends, in1923, when he made an excursion to Madrid from Paris, where he was living atthe time. From the moment the first bull burst into the ring he was overwhelmedby the experience and left the scene a lifelong fan. For him the spectacle of aman pitted against a wild bull was a tragedy rather than a sport. He wasfascinated by its techniques and conventions, the skill and courage required bythe toreros, and the sheer violence of the bulls. He soon became anacknowledged expert on bullfighting and wrote a famous treatise on the subject,Death in the Afternoon. A number of his stories also have bullfightingthemes.

In time, Hemingway came to love all of Spain -- its customs, its landscapes,its art treasures, and its people. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in thelast week of July 1936, he was a staunch supporter of the Loyalists, helping toprovide support for their cause and covering the war from Madrid as acorrespondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Out of the entirety ofhis experiences in Spain during the war he produced seven short stories inaddition to his novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and his play, TheFifth Column. It was one of the most prolific and inspired periods of hiswriting career.

In 1933, when his wife Pauline's wealthy uncle Gus Pfeiffer offered to stakethe Hemingways to an African safari, Ernest was totally captivated by theprospect and made endless preparations, including inviting a company of friendsto join them and selecting suitable weapons and other equipment for the trip.

The safari itself lasted about ten weeks, but everything he saw seems to havemade an indelible impression on his mind. Perhaps he regained, as the result ofhis enthusiasm and interest, a childlike capacity to re cord details almostphotographically. It was his first meeting with the famous white hunter PhillipPercival, whom he admired at once for his cool and sometimes cunningprofessionalism. At the end of the safari, Hemingway had filled his mind withimages, incidents, and character studies of unique value for his writings. Asthe harvest of the trip he wrote the nonfiction novel Green Hills ofAfrica, and some of his finest stories. These include "The Short Happy Lifeof Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" as well as "An AfricanStory," which appeared as a story within a story in The Garden of Eden,a novel published posthumously in May 1986.

In spite of the obvious importance of the Paris years on Hemingway'sdevelopment as a writer, few of his short stories have French settings. He wasaware of that fact and in his preface to A Moveable Feast wistfullymentions subjects that he might have written about, some of which might havebecome short stories.

During World War II Hemingway served as a war correspondent covering theNormandy invasions and the liberation of Paris. It seems that he also assembled a group of extramilitary scouts keeping pace with the retreating Germans. The balance between fiction and nonfiction in his stories of the period, including the previously unpublished "Black Ass at the Cross Roads," may never be determined.

Toward the end of his life Hemingway wrote two fables for the child of afriend, "The Good Lion" and "The Faithful Bull," which were published byHoliday in 1951 and are reprinted here. He also published two shortstories in The Atlantic Monthly, "Get a Seeing-Eyed Dog," and "A Man of the World" (both December 20, 1957).

We have g rouped seven previously unpublished works of fiction at the back ofthe book. Four of these represent completed short stories; the other threecomprise extended scenes from unpublished, uncompleted novels.

All in all, this Finca Vigía edition contains twenty-one stories that were not included in "The First Forty-nine." The collection is named for Hemingway's home in San Francisco de Paula, Cuba. He lived at Finca Vigía ("Lookout Farm") on and off during the last two decades of his life. The finca was dear to his heart and it seems appropriate now that it should contain a major portion of his life work, which was even more dear.

-- Charles Scribner, Jr.

Copyright © 1987 by Simon & Schuster Inc.