Green Hills of Africa

Ernest Hemingway

Jul 2002 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."
-- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

In the winter of 1933, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Pauline set out on a two-month safari in the big-game country of East Africa, camping out on the great Serengeti Plain at the foot of magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro. "I had quite a trip," the author told his friend Philip Percival, with characteristic understatement.
Green Hills of Africa is Hemingway's account of that expedition, of what it taught him about Africa and himself. Richly evocative of the region's natural beauty, tremendously alive to its character, culture, and customs, and pregnant with a hard-won wisdom gained from the extraordinary situations it describes, it is widely held to be one of the twentieth century's classic travelogues.

Ratings and reviews

I read this book while on a photo safari in the same areas that are covered in "Green Hills", and while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, on my first visit to Africa. Hemingway does an excellent job of putting you there, in the bush, on the plains, in the flats, and with the people of this region. If you cannot go yourself, this is the book to read. I am not a big game hunter, but you cannot judge these people with today's sensibilities. Hemingway was actually one of the greatest conservationists of his day, as was his childhood idol -- T Roosevelt -- who he was important to his desire to explore Africa.Both men killed, but in the context of the day the "conservation ethic" was very different than now. His trademark honesty and self-awareness is also present, giving superb descriptions of people and their self-absorbing natures. I will never go on a hunting safari in Africa, but this book comes as close as anything I have read to giving you that experience. His geographic descriptions are dead on.

About the author

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961.