Ernest Hemingway’s 17 favourite books: “A pleasure”
If you take a trip to Oak Park, Illinois, you can stroll a few blocks between the former homes of Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc – the holy trinity of Midwestern American machismo.
Hemingway likely never ate a Chicken McNugget. He died in 1961 before McDonald’s had really taken off, but more importantly, he preferred to kill and defeather his own game.
In a 1935 essay published in Esquire and reprinted in a number of hunting and sportsman magazines, titled ‘Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter’, Hemingway goes into great romantic detail about his lifelong love for blasting all varieties of winged beasts, be they snipe, pheasant, partridge, or grouse.
“Why does the curlew have that voice,” he writes, “And who thought up the plover’s call, which takes the place of noise of wings, to give us that catharsis wingshooting has given to men since they stopped flying hawks and took to fowling pieces? I think that they were made to shoot, and some of us were made to shoot them, and if that is not so well, never say we did not tell you that we liked it.”
The article is written with a great deal of boo-hoo nostalgia, as Hemingway, now a 36-year-old, world-famous writer making his home in Key West, had less access to the game-hunting opportunities of his youth, and found the alternative of clay shooting quite dull, mainly because you couldn’t hear the flapping wings of the target and the thud of its corpse on the grass.
Anyway, even if you don’t align with Ernest’s brutish views on bird life, you might have more than a passing interest in his equally passionate opinions on bars, or on books, a subject to which he devotes a lengthy tangent in ‘Remembering Shooting-Flying’.
Explaining, “When you have loved three things all your life, from the earliest you can remember: to fish, to shoot and later to read; and when, all your life, the necessity to write has been your master, you learn to remember more fishing and shooting and reading than anything else, and that is a pleasure.”
Much in the way he longs for the days of firing buckshot through a mallard, Hemingway writes of his desire to be able to read his all-time favourite works of literature again for the first time.
He then lists off 17 classics that he’d happily nominate for this honour, starting with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Hemingway attempts to tie it all together by noting how “some of the best shooting I remember was in Tolstoy and I have often wondered how the snipe fly in Russia now and whether shooting pheasants is counter-revolutionary.”
You can also check out how this list compares to a similar reading list Hemingway recommended to a young writer named Arnold Samuelson a year earlier.
Ernest Hemingway’s 17 favourite books, as of 1935:
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Far Away and Long Ago – William Henry Hudson
- Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- A Sportsman’s Sketches – Ivan Turgenev
- The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Hail and Farewell – George Moore
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
- Winesburg, Ohio – Sherwood Anderson
- La Reine Margot – Alexandre Dumas
- La Maison Tellier – Guy de Maupassant
- Le Rouge et le Noir – Stendhal
- La Chartreuse de Parme (Charterhouse of Parma) – Stendhal
- Dubliners – James Joyce
- The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats
