Hemingway in Africa

Africa was an obsession for Hemingway throughout his life. Long before he wrote his first published book review (of an African novel), The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, The Green Hills of Africa, or his posthumous novel, True at First Light (based on his final safari in 1953), he had been enthralled as a ten-year-old by newspaper accounts of the African expedition undertaken in 1909 by his boyhood idol, Theodore Roosevelt. In writing Hemingway in Africa, Christopher Ondaatje followed the trail of Hemingway's two major African safaris - through Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda - and analyzes Hemingway's writings to uncover a startling amount of new material, both documentary and literary, on this rarely discussed, vitally important aspect of Hemingway's life and work. With broad insight into one of the themes that defined Hemingway's career, Hemingway in Africa provides a compelling look into the life of the author for whom dangerous exploits were 'in the final analysis an effort to relieve the intensity of existing at the edge.'