The Snows of Kilimanjaro Study Guide

In addition to his critically-acclaimed writing, Nobel-prize winning novelist, short story author, and journalist Ernest Hemingway is also famed for his adventurous lifestyle that took him across continents, cultures, and conflicts. He was an ambulance driver in Italy in World War I and a journalist covering the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. He witnessed the Allies landing on the beaches on D-Day and the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation during WWII as a foreign correspondent. He moved to Paris in the 1920s with his first of four wives, Hadley Richardson. There he became part of a group dubbed “The Lost Generation,” which included the likes of artist Pablo Picasso and writer James Joyce. He divorced Richardson for Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927, whom he later left for Martha Gellhorn in 1940. He met his last wife, Mary Welsh, during WWII in London. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his celebrated novel The Old Man and the Sea. After sustaining various injuries, including from surviving several plane crashes in Africa, Hemingway retired to Ketchum, Idaho, where he shot himself on July 2, 1961.

At its height in the early 20th century, Literary Modernism was a reaction and response to the traditional viewpoints and aesthetic of the Victorian period. The writers of this era had recently lived through the chaos of World War I, and the horrors and suffering of trench warfare radically changed their perspectives on society, humanity, and artistic expression. Hemingway became a key figure of the movement when he met the expatriate community known as “The Lost Generation” in Paris in the 1920s. Later, the effects of the Great Depression reverberated globally throughout the 1930s after the Wall Street Crash in 1929. Crippling poverty hit across many levels of society, a stark contrast to the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, exposing the failings of the contemporary social and economic system. The violence of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s also had a profound ideological impact on many influential artists and writers of the time and their work, including Hemingway and his fellow Lost Generation member, Pablo Picasso.

Influential writer Ezra Pound summed up the Literary Modernist period succinctly: “Make it new.” Thus, experimentation was a guiding principle of the literary works of the time. This brought about untrustworthy narrators, an indistinct concept of “truth,” and a fascination with consciousness, leading to the stream of consciousness style Hemingway employs through much of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” James Joyce’s Ulysses is noted as a leading example of the storytelling style, where the events of the novel take place largely within the mind of protagonist Leopold Bloom over the course of a routine day. A fellow member of “The Lost Generation,” Joyce was an acquaintance of Hemingway’s in Paris. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway also uses stream of consciousness techniques and flashbacks, although dissimilarly to Hemingway’s story, the narrative moves back and forth between the eponymous upper-class Clarissa Dalloway and WWI veteran Septimus Warren Smith. However, the contrast between the anxieties of the ultra-rich socialites and the suffering of the shell-shocked veteran draw on social tensions similar to those explored in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”