"If I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it," Ernest Hemingway writes in the Epilogue of Death in the Afternoon, included here as the final piece in The Essential Hemingway (pg. 499). The piece itself is an impressive one, as Hemingway presents a glorious mosaic of impressions that he had not been able to include in the body of his book, but it is also, no doubt, sequenced as the final piece in The Essential Hemingway as an acknowledgement from the editors that they cannot include everything that is impressive and essential about this author.

The Essential Hemingway was not, for me, an introduction. Hemingway has been my favourite author since I first picked up a book of his nearly eleven years ago, and this opinion has been unshakeable even as I experienced other authors, and moved from the masterpieces of his novels and short stories to his more obscure work and even the miscellanea of posthumously-published manuscripts and his Selected Letters. That said, I imagine that as an introduction The Essential Hemingway would be a perfectly fine one, as there is a good spread included here of the man's work.

Rather, for me The Essential Hemingway was a coda, an excuse to revisit some of the finest writing I had ever read, in some cases more than a decade after I last read it. I was not the biggest fan of The Sun Also Rises when I read it in early 2013, though I respected it immensely, but its inclusion (in its 200-page entirety) at the start of The Essential Hemingway was a great opportunity to revisit it with new eyes. It held up well – it is the most determinedly modern of Hemingway's novels, in the sense that his commitment to his new and original style is its most rigid and pure – and while it's still not a favourite of mine, its subtler moments were better impressed on me this time around. It's an excellent novel and this opinion overwrites any I might previously have had.

Even so, the decision to include the entire book highlights a quite natural dispute any Hemingway aficionado would have with an 'essential' or 'greatest hits' anthology – the choices made in the selections. The Sun Also Rises might have been better represented by the inclusion of its Pamplona chapters alone, with the Paris sections instead replaced with selections from A Moveable Feast. But The Essential Hemingway was published in 1947, while Hemingway was still alive and before A Moveable Feast had even been written. Nevertheless, the edition of The Essential Hemingway I read was from 2004, and it would have been to the publisher's great credit if they had revised the selections. Alongside A Moveable Feast, the absence of 1952's The Old Man and the Sea – arguably Hemingway's greatest piece, and short enough to be included in its entirety – tells us that this 1947 anthology can no longer truly claim to contain the 'essential' Hemingway.

The selections from A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are well-chosen, though the best chapters from those two novels are their devastating and eloquent final chapters – neither included here. There are good reasons for these omissions (including an ending without the context of what came before hardly does good service to a writer) but, again, their lack does not show off the best of Hemingway. The chapter from To Have and Have Not was also well-chosen – the prospect of the lights of Havana in that story shows his genius – though I still remember a stark passage on suicide by gun from that novel, which would also deserve inclusion.

I was disappointed that there was nothing of the Venetian chapters of Across the River and Into the Trees – in my opinion, a hugely under-rated novel – nor anything from Green Hills of Africa. However, regarding the latter, Hemingway's African experiences are well-covered by the inclusion of two of Hemingway's most singular masterpieces, the short stories 'The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber' and 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'. The former is the epitome of what a short story should be – character revealed by plot yet remaining ambiguous and multi-faceted, and storytelling depth presented with concision and eloquence. The latter is almost transcendental – a rarity for Hemingway and his most clear-sighted attempt to tackle his life-long obsession with death. It's quite something to see Hemingway turn his formidable talent to attack such an obstacle, turning his literary guns to face his own failings and neuroses decades before he would attack himself with a more literal gun. (And this is the writer that some fools claim, nowadays, to be little more than a macho stylist!) Both stories are stories that only Hemingway, with his experiences and his talent, could have written.

Speaking of short stories, The Essential Hemingway also includes the entirety of In Our Time, Hemingway's first proper short story collection. Like the inclusion of The Sun Also Rises, I felt the inclusion of the entire book was unnecessary; it would have been better to include only its best stories: 'Indian Camp', 'Soldier's Home', 'Cat in the Rain' and 'Big Two-Hearted River'. Inclusions from Hemingway's other short story collections are largely appropriate, including the truly essential 'Hills Like White Elephants' and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place'. However, I would dispute the omission of 'The Capital of the World', 'After the Storm', 'A Day's Wait' and 'Up in Michigan'.

There's also nothing of Hemingway's journalism in The Essential Hemingway. Many will consider this a hill not worth dying on, but like El Sordo on the hilltop I want to make a decent go of it. Some of Hemingway's long-form Esquire pieces from the 1930s are exceptional, including the anti-war message of 'Notes on the Next War', the big-game hunting piece 'Notes on Dangerous Game' and 'Monologue to the Maestro', in which Hemingway dispenses essential advice to writers. (As a sidebar, one would have thought that the passages from Death in the Afternoon where Hemingway outlines his famous 'iceberg theory' of writing should also be considered essential, but they are not included.) These journalistic pieces are already collected in the anthology By-Line, but if The Essential Hemingway was truly essential and comprehensive, it would include them, and perhaps also pieces from By-Line such as 'The Christmas Gift', where Hemingway recounts his two near-fatal plane crashes in Africa, and his often-overlooked dispatches from World War Two for Collier's magazine.

Nevertheless, despite these criticisms and the lack of update to the original 1947 version of The Essential Hemingway, the book remains a marvel. It is, after all, Ernest Hemingway, and while I may dispute some of the selections and omissions, it's never a bad thing to return to the writing of one who ranks among the very best of all time. His was a talent and a vitality that breathed into everything he wrote, so that even in a minor or inessential story you feel it fill your lungs and it feels as good as oxygen always feels. Hemingway's sentences are so well-crafted that they just rest well on the page and in your eyes – particularly, for some reason, in these Arrow editions – but Hemingway was more than a stylist, or a man of action. He was a writer of multitudes, and you can read anything by him and get a good impression of the wider whole which he represented. He embodied greatly the 'iceberg theory' he patented; he believed, and proved by his example, that "any part you make will represent the whole if it's made truly" (pg. 506). The Essential Hemingway proves, ironically as much by its omissions as its selections, that this proponent of the 'theory of omission' was a truly special writer. ( )

[From Great Modern Reading, ed. W. Somerset Maugham, Doubleday, 1943, pp. 157-8 & 527:]

Take Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited” for example. I do not think it a very good story, for it is carelessly written and not quite convincing, but it offers a vivid picture of the time when young Americans, tempted by the favorable exchange and looking for something they thought they could not find at home, flocked to Paris and the Riviera. Not many of them profited by the experience.

[...]

But it was not only literally that they looked upon the wine when it was red, these young men who went abroad; not few of them imbibed also of the strong wine of French culture, and its effects were perhaps not less harmful. They accepted the French at their own very absurd valuation of themselves, which was that outside France nothing of artistic value existed or could exist, and humbly put themselves to school at the feet of a number of very mediocre writers. Some went to pieces. The most talented bartered their native energy for a mannered stylization and a symbolism foreign to their temper. The only writer I can think of who benefited from contact with Europe is Ernest Hemingway. I have a notion that without it he would not have acquired the breadth of outlook and the sensitiveness to beauty that make him to my mind the most versatile and powerful writer of fiction in the English-speaking countries. I have a notion that except for that he might never have learned how to describe nature so precisely and so exquisitely that, though it must be fifteen years since I read The Sun Also Rises, I still remember with ravishment his pictures, so concise and apparently so casual, of the Spanish landscape.

[...]

The success of For Whom the Bell Tolls was so great and is so recent that it seems unnecessary to speak of it. There are episodes in this book that only Ernest Hemingway could have written, but they are so graphic and so brilliant that to my mind they somewhat impair the unity of the story, and for that reason, from purely technical standpoint I am inclined to think Farewell to Arms, though a less important book, a better novel.

Early (1924-1941) Hemingway

I suspect if you love Hemingway it is the very late (e.g. the Paris memoir "A Moveable Feast" and the very early (the vignettes version "in our time" (1924) & the later expanded "In Our Time" (1925)) that were probably the cause of that love. They were for me in any case.

The Essential Hemingway is a 1947 U.K. anthology edition first published by Jonathan Cape and reissued by a few other publishers since that time but apparently never updated. It is hard to justify it still being called "the essential" when it has nothing from the later years. The now rare "The Hemingway Reader" does a better job in covering everything except for the posthumous works.

This is still a good value as you get the complete "The Sun Also Rises" (c. 200 pgs.), excerpts from "A Farewell to Arms", "To Have and Have Not", "For Whom the Bell Tolls" & "Death in the Afternoon" (c. 100 pgs) and 25 short stories w/ 15 vignettes interspersed (i.e. the complete "In Our Time") (c. 200 pgs).

Shamefully and unbelievably, there are typos in this 20th printing (c. 2014) of the 2004 paperback edition from Arrow Books (e.g. "hopppers" for hoppers and "Nich" for Nick on page 385) so points off for that. ( )

'The Essential Hemingway' contains the full text of Fiesta, the author's first major novel and extracts from three other novels. It also includes 25 short stories and an epilogue to 'Death in the Afternoon'.

Contains the complete "Fiesta - The Sun Also Rises", and long extracts from three of Hemingway's greatest novels: A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls. As well as twenty-five of his best short stories, and the Epilogue from Death in the Afternoon. ( )