The Slopes of Kilimanjaro: A Biographical Perspective

Abstract

In August, 1935, Ernest Hemingway completed the first draft of a story about a writer who died of gangrene on a hunting trip in what was then Tanganyika. non-fiction novel, Green Hills of Africa, was already in press and due for publication in October. But the book not used up all the material which Hemingway accumulated in the course of his shooting safari of January and February 1934. new story was an attempt present some more of what he knew, or could imagine, in fictional form. As was his custom, he put the handwritten sheets away in his desk settle and objectify. Eight months later, on a fishing-trip Cuba, he re-examined his first draft, modified it somewhat, got it typed, and gave the typescript one final working over. Then he mailed it Arnold Gingrich for publication in Esquire magazine in August, 1936, exactly a year after its inception. Although he sweated mightily over the title, as he commonly did with all his titles, his ultimate choice displayed the true romantic luminosity. It was called The Snows of Kilimanjaro. new story was curiously and subtly connected with Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Thoreau lately been in Hemingway's consciousness. There is one [author] at that time [of the nineteenth century] that is supposed be really good, he asserted in Green Hills of Africa. cannot tell you about it [Walden] because I have not yet been able read it. But that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are being extremely accurate and not literary.... Maybe I'll be able [read it] later. If he ever read the second chapter of Walden, Where I Lived and What I Lived For, Hemingway would certainly have been struck by Thoreau's statement about his reasons for the sojourn at Walden Pond. He took the woods in order to live deliberately, front only the essential facts of life. He wanted learn the lore of nature as early as possible so that he would not reach the point of dying only discover that he had not lived in any real sense at all. It is of course a far cry from Thoreau's asceticism Hemingway's aggressive hedonism. Yet the passage from Walden, slightly modified, embodies the theme of The Snows of Kilimanjaro. For Hemingway's protagonist, dying of a noisome infection on the plains of Africa, is made reflect bitterly upon his failure set down the results of his