Ernest Hemingway Books
   
  Across The River & Into The Trees

Across The River &
Into The Trees

   
      Across the River and Into the Woods takes its title from the final words of Stonewall Jackson to his aide. E. B. White parodied it in Across the Street and Into the Grill, published in The New Yorker, in which he mocked the novel mercilessly. It showed Hemingway’s difficulty in settling into writing fiction again after being a war correspondent.

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The Sun Also Rises

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

Islands in The Stream

The Garden Of Eden

True at First Light

The Snows
of Kilimanjaro

A Moveable Feast

 
 

The plot is the story of Cantwell, a retired United States Army officer. The colonel, Cantwell, is taking liberty in Italy, and ponders wrong that he perceives to have been done to him by generals Eisenhower, Patton, Leclerc and Montgomery. He rose in rank under his own steam, and made more powerful soldiers jealous and receiving a demotion because of an impossible situation.

After a brief affair with a nineteen year old Venetian contessa, Renata, fifty year old Cantwell reflects on his life, quotes Stonewall Jackson, crawls to the backseat of his staff car, and dies of a heart attack. His aide, angered by a criticism, chose to disregard a request to return personal items to Venice directly, but sent them through channels. The theme seems to be that politics controls our lives.

Some critics have called this the low point of Hemingway’s career. It was one of several pieces he wrote in Cuba, after World War II. The hero is the victim.

 
 
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