Short Story Collection: The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

Overview
Ernest Hemingway’s 1961 collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories gathers a dozen of his most enduring short works, spanning Africa, Europe, and the American Midwest to chart war’s aftershocks, private courage and cowardice, and the ways people brace themselves against loneliness and death. The volume places the famous African tale of a dying writer alongside pieces set in hospitals, cafés, prizefighting rings, and bullrings, giving a compact tour of Hemingway’s signature subjects and his pared, resonant style.

Core narratives
The title story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, follows Harry, a writer dying of gangrene on safari, as he drifts between bitter quarrels, memories of places and people he never wrote about, and an imagined ascent toward a pristine summit. The story fuses regret, creative failure, and a stark vision of mortality, with Africa’s landscape serving as both reproach and ideal.

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, another African story, tracks a wealthy couple and their professional guide through a safari where fear, pride, and marital power play out with lethal consequences. Macomber’s late burst of courage collides with his wife’s wary dominance, ending in a death whose cause remains unsettlingly unresolved.

Hemingway also returns to the Nick Adams cycle and to the aftermath of war. In The Killers, two hit men enter a diner to murder a resigned former boxer, and a young Nick confronts the chill of adult fatalism. In Another Country places wounded officers in a Milan hospital where machines promise recovery while grief and isolation hollow out those promises. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place distills the ache of meaninglessness into a nighttime exchange between waiters, a meditation on dignity, age, and the small sanctuaries that keep despair at bay.

Other stories widen the range. The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio gathers a wounded man, a pious nun, and a web of small-time gamblers around the ways people numb suffering, faith, morphine, music, talk, each a different form of solace. Fathers and Sons has Nick look back on hunting, women, and his father’s complicated legacy, the prose moving with a quiet ache of memory. The Undefeated follows an aging bullfighter who faces obsolescence with battered pride, while The Capital of the World sketches a young waiter infatuated with the myth of bullfighting, whose mock bravado leads to a sudden, banal death. A Day’s Wait shows a boy’s stoicism when he misreads a fever thermometer and prepares himself to die. Wine of Wyoming and A Natural History of the Dead round out the book: the former a dry, tender look at expatriate life and bootleg hospitality; the latter a sardonic catalog from the war’s edge that turns clinical language into moral shock.

Themes and settings
Across these pieces, courage is less a triumphant pose than a daily discipline; cowardice is often a misunderstanding or a stage along the way. War lingers in bodies and rooms; sport and hunting expose codes of honor and the limits of performance; marriage becomes a battlefield of power and desire. Geographies, African plains, Spanish bullrings, Italian hospitals, American cafés, mirror inner weather, their clarity sharpening the stakes of choices made in private.

Style and unity
The collection exemplifies Hemingway’s economy: concrete surfaces, withheld explanation, and dialogue that reveals more than it says. Refrains, silences, and exact detail accumulate until the emotional weight lands. Read together, the stories form a mosaic of how people hold on, through work, ritual, companionship, or transient places of light, while acknowledging that loss is certain and grace, if it comes, is brief.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories

A collection of short stories that feature various themes and subjects, including war, love, and death.


Author: Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway, his literary contributions, and the profound impact of his adventurous lifestyle on his celebrated works.
More about Ernest Hemingway

Shortlist

No items yet. Click "Add" on a Quote.