Green Hills of Africa
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'Green Hills of Africa' is a 1935 nonfiction book by Ernest Hemingway on the subject of the East African hunting safari he took with his wife in December of 1933, with the legendary Philip Percival as his guide. Most of the action takes place in the region of Lake Manyara in Kenya.
It was the first of two African safaris he took in his life (the second was in 1953-1954, and was fictionalized in True at First Light). In addition to inspiring Green Hills of Africa, the first safari also was the impetus for the two short stories "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and The Snows of Kilimanjaro. It was originally serialized in Scribner's Magazine, from May to November of 1935.
The book may be best well known today for a line that has nearly nothing to do with its subject:
- "The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That's not the order they're good in. There is no order for good writers....All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
This quote is frequently used as evidence that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is The Great American Novel.
[edit] References in popular culture
In the MMORPG World of Warcraft, there is a book called The Green Hills of Stranglethorn, written by the dwarf Hemet Nesingwary (his name is an anagram of Hemingway's), who leads a hunting expedition in Stranglethorn Vale. The pages of the book can be found everywhere in the jungle.
| Ernest Hemingway Books |
| Novels: The Torrents of Spring | The Sun Also Rises (¡Fiesta!) | A Farewell to Arms | To Have and Have Not | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Across the River and Into the Trees | The Old Man and the Sea | Adventures of a Young Man | Islands in the Stream | The Garden of Eden |
| Non-fiction: Death in the Afternoon | Green Hills of Africa | The Dangerous Summer | A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 | Under Kilimanjaro |
| Short story books: Three Stories and Ten Poems | In Our Time | Men Without Women | Winner Take Nothing | The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories | The Snows of Kilimanjaro | The Essential Hemingway | The Hemingway Reader | The Nick Adams Stories | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | The Collected Stories |
Lake Manyara is located in Tanzania and not Kenya
