Islands in the Stream

Published posthumously in 1970, nine years after Hemingway’s suicide in 1961, Islands in the Stream is a novel of extraordinary depth and scope. Originally intended to encompass three stories to illustrate different stages in the life of its main characters, the three different parts were compiled into a single story. The story is told in three acts: “Bimini”, “Cuba”, and “At Sea”. The 3 sections of this book, although all centering on the same main character, vary greatly in tone and emotion. The joy, the grief and the battle to continue are this man's journey and it works, even though the shifts feel abrupt and brutal. Even the joy at the beginning of the book is subsumed in a sense of impending doom. The book is not a "happy book" in any sense, but it is remarkably redemptive.


Ernest Hemingway was one of the most famous American writers of the 20th century. He wrote novels and short stories about outdoorsmen, expatriates, soldiers and other men of action, and his plainspoken no-frills writing style became so famous that it was (and still is) frequently parodied. Hemingway's dashing machismo was almost as famous as his writing: he lived in Paris, Cuba and Key West, fancied bullfighting and big game hunting, and served as a war correspondent in World War II and the Spanish Civil War. Ernest Hemingway sealed his own notoriety when he killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. His books include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and his classic novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). His short novel The Old Man and the Sea (1952) won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. After his death he was buried in Ketchum Cemetery in Ketchum, Idaho, the remote town where he had a home (and where he killed himself).