The Snows of Kilimanjaro

📒 Where Somerset Maugham had been clinical and dispassionate and Katherine Mansfield passive and poetical, Hemingway seized the short story and injected violence, brutality, passion, blood, and death into it. As a journalist he had learned to pare his style down to a verbal photography of action. His threading of strong and simple words on to short, staccato sentences became the envy of a whole school of imitators. But very few managed to suggest the compassion that lies between the lines of clipped action and laconic dialogue in Hemingway's stories. "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is probably the best short story he ever wrote. Face to face with death a writer on safari contemplates all the stories there will now be no time to write. The other stories in this volume are all early ones, and those which feature Nick Adams are at least in part autobiographical.