Hemingway and Italy ─ Twenty-First-Century Perspectives

“A true gift for Hemingway aficionados! With previously unpublished work by Hemingway, memories of the writer by those who knew him, and essays by an outstanding international team of scholars, this collection deepens our understanding of Hemingway’s relationship to a country that he loved and that was central to his fiction.”—Carl P. Eby, author of Hemingway’s Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood

“These extremely powerful essays bring a richer and more cosmopolitan understanding of the Italian underpinnings of Hemingway’s writing.”—Linda Patterson Miller, editor of Letters from the Lost Generation: Gerald and Sara Murphy and Friends

“A useful experience for readers. Its blending of biography and textual study is perfect.”—Linda Wagner-Martin, editor of Hemingway: Eight Decades of Criticism

From his World War I service in Italy through his transformational return visits during the decades that followed, Ernest Hemingway’s Italian experiences were fundamental to his artistic development. Hemingway and Italy offers essays from top scholars, exciting new voices, and people who knew Hemingway during his Italian days, examining how his adopted homeland shaped his writing and his legacy.

The collection addresses Hemingway’s many Italys—the terrain and people he encountered during his life and the country he transposed into his fiction. Contributors analyze Hemingway’s Italian works, including A Farewell to Arms, Across the River and into the Trees, lesser-known short stories, fables, and even a previously unpublished Hemingway sketch, “Torcello Piece.”

The essays provide fresh insights on Hemingway’s Italian life, career, and imagination.

Mark Cirino, associate professor and Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair of English at the University of Evansville, is the author or editor of several books, including Ernest Hemingway: Thought in Action. Mark P. Ott, instructor of English at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, is the author or editor of several books, including A Sea of Change: Ernest Hemingway and the Gulf Stream—A Contextual Biography.