The novel that established his reputation, The Sun Also Rises (1926), is the story of a group of aimless Americans and Britons living in France and Spain, members of the lost generation of the post-World War I period. In 1929 Hemingway published his second important novel, A Farewell to Arms, the deeply moving story of a love affair in wartime Italy between an American in the Italian ambulance service and a British nurse. It was followed by two non-fiction works, Death in the Afternoon (1932), prose pieces mainly about bullfighting; and Green Hills of Africa (1935), accounts of big-game hunting.
In his writing, Hemingway began by exploring themes of helplessness and defeat, but in the late 1930s he began to express concern for social problems. His novel To Have and Have Not (1937) and his play The Fifth Column (1938), celebrating “the nobility and dignity of the Spanish people in the Spanish Civil War”, strongly condemned economic and political injustices. Two of his best short stories, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, are published alongside the play in The First Forty-Nine Hours and Other Stories (1938). In the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), based on his experiences of the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway argued that the loss of liberty anywhere in the world should be a warning to all that liberty is endangered everywhere. This novel was his most successful work in terms of number of books sold, and commanded a then unprecedented sum for the film rights. During the next decade his only literary efforts were Men at War: the Best War Stories of All Time (1942), which he edited, and the novel Across the River and into the Trees (1950), about a World War I veteran returning to the battlefield where he was wounded.
In 1952 Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea, a powerful, short, heroic novel about an aged Cuban fisherman, for which he won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Hemingway later said of this work that it was “poetry written into prose” and was “the hardest of all things to do”. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The last work published in his lifetime was Collected Poems (1960). His posthumously published books include A Moveable Feast (1964), an account of his early years in Paris; Byline: Ernest Hemingway (1967), selected newspaper articles and dispatches; Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories (1970); Islands in the Stream (1970), a sea novel; The Nick Adams Stories (1972), initially featured in In Our Time and establishing the prototypical Hemingway hero; and the unfinished The Garden of Eden (1986). Hemingway’s Selected Letters 1917-1961 were published in 1981.