Green Hills of Africa

First published in 1935, Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway’s account of a month spent hunting big game in the wilderness of East Africa. Drawn from a safari undertaken with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in 1933–34, the book follows Hemingway across the plains, forests, and highlands of what was then Tanganyika, in pursuit of kudu and other elusive game. Between long days of tracking animals and evenings spent around camp, he records the pleasures of companionship, the frustrations of competition, and the extraordinary beauty of the African landscape. Yet the expedition also becomes an occasion for reflection on literature, ambition, and the uneasy relationship between man and the natural world.

Written with the precision and economy that had become his signature, the book was Hemingway’s attempt to give a work of nonfiction the imaginative force of a novel. His descriptions of the landscape stand alongside candid, often combative conversations about writers and writing, revealing a man as preoccupied with the demands of his craft as with the hunt itself. Published between A Farewell to Arms and To Have and Have Not, it occupies a distinctive place in his career and anticipates the African settings of such celebrated stories as The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Both a portrait of a vanished colonial world and an unusually intimate account of its author, Green Hills of Africa reveals Hemingway’s fascination with courage, rivalry, beauty, and the pursuit of an ideal that forever seems just beyond reach.

From the book

“I have a good life but I must write because if I do not write a certain amount I do not enjoy the rest of my life.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

On Green Hills of Africa

“It contains some of the best writing Ernest Hemingway has done.”

— Kirkus Reviews, 1935