THE FOLIO SOCIETY

The Sun Also Rises (1926)

In the sparse prose and clipped dialogue which would become his trademark, Hemingway wrote a superbly funny, but ultimately tragic portrait of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’. From the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley, always flitting between adoring lovers, to the incorrigible bankrupt Mike, this group of friends are witty and hard-drinking, but beneath the glittering banter lie the mental scars of the First World War. The American journalist Jake Barnes has been left impotent from a war wound, but as the group travels from Paris to Spain and experiences the great festival of bulls at Pamplona, it seems that Jake is far from the most damaged amongst them.

‘Magnificent writing ... beyond question a brilliant, witty performance’
NEW YORK TIMES


A Farewell to Arms (1929)

The adolescent Hemingway was desperate to be involved in the First World War. Soon after volunteering for an American ambulance unit in 1918, he was wounded in Italy. From this first engagement with military action emerged A Farewell to Arms, the novel which established his reputation as one of the finest writers about war in the English language. While the central love affair may be a thinlyveiled portrait of the author’s own experiences, the retreat from Caporetto and the evocation of place and atmosphere exhibit Hemingway’s powers at their most compelling.

‘A novel of great power’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT


To Have and Have Not (1937)

Harry Morgan is the classic Hemingway hero: a hard-drinking, gun-running seabird ferrying smugglers and would-be revolutionaries from Havana to the Florida Keys. But unlike the character played by Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’s classic movie, Hemingway’s Morgan does what he does because he has a family to feed.Though he and his wife are poor by comparison with the Gordons and Bradleys – savage caricatures that meant the novel had to be issued with a disclaimer – the Morgans ‘have’ something that cannot be judged by distinctions of wealth alone. Hemingway’s sympathy with the Left has never been more stridently expressed.

‘Absorbing and moving ... sustains a high pitch of excitement throughout’
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT


For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

An operation seen as crucial to the success of the Republican offensive falls to Robert Jordan, an idealistic American volunteer. Amid the hardships, brutality and intense comradeship of the guerillas’ mountain enclave, he encounters Maria, a young Spanish woman with terrible memories of the Fascists. Blending political polemic, exciting narrative and effective psychological drama, For Whom the Bell Tolls is an epic account of the ‘earth-moving passions’ of the Spanish Civil War.

‘The best fictional report on the Spanish Civil War that we possess’
ANTHONY BURGESS

‘The best book Hemingway has written, the fullest, the deepest, the truest’
NEW YORK TIMES