“Have Sure Tried”: Hemingway’s Unfaltering Career

Abstract

Abstract Because Ernest Hemingway published only one novel, a novella, and a handful of short stories after his return from the battlefields of France in 1945, he has often been viewed as a writer suffering a late-life decline. As the posthumously published books attest, however, during the last fifteen years of his life, Hemingway was very productive. In giving a shape to the many pages Hemingway left behind, the editors who have brought books like A Moveable Feast (1964) and The Garden of Eden (1986) into print have at times created works of great power and beauty. Moreover, the writing done during “the Final Years,” as Michael Reynolds calls them, forms a series of linked projects in which Hemingway explored how he had tried, and often failed, to be what he called “a good man.”Hemingway’s late-life work—and this is especially true of the posthumously published books—accomplishes something impressive indeed: a prolonged act of confession and Last Judgment.