Great Hemingway Reads

This year the Great Michigan Read is focusing on Ernest Hemingway's The Nick Adams Stories, Hemingway's semi-autobiographical short stories set in Northern Michigan. Hemingway is considered to be a master of the short story form, and the Nick Adams series of short stories, although among the first works Hemingway ever published, certainly prove this point. So after you've enjoyed some of the best short fiction around (and joined us in our discussion of The Nick Adams Stories on December 13, 2007 at 6:30pm in the lower level of the library, 143 E. Maumee St., Adrian, Michigan), I know you'll be hungry for more of Hemingway's works.

Hemingway was a member of the "Lost Generation", the group of expatriate artists living in Paris in the 1920's (in fact, many of the Nick Adams stories, although set in Northern Michigan, were written while Hemingway was living in Paris). A Moveable Feast is his memoir about this time in his life, and is filled with anecdotes about F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and other fellow artists--just a fascinating picture of this time in history. Hemingway is also well known for his sense of adventure: read Green Hills of Africa for his descriptions of big game hunting and Death in the Afternoon for the excitement of bullfighting. Combining Hemingway's sense of adventure with his mastery of the novel, turn to The Sun Also Rises for bullfighting and the "Lost Generation" or A Farewell to Arms for ambulance driving and love in World War I.

Have I convinced you to read more of Hemingway yet? Because if I haven't, do I have a movie for you! On November 1st at 7:00pm in the lower level of the library, we will be showing Spencer Tracy in The Old Man and the Sea, the movie based on Hemingway's short novel by the same name. Published in 1952, the same year Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature, The Old Man and the Sea is a novel--and a movie--that is not to be missed.

While The Great Michigan Read wants you to get to know Nick Adams this fall, don't stop there: come to the Adrian Public Library and get involved with a great Hemingway read.