This selection is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most brilliant and enduring, “Big Two-Hearted River.” The story deserves a patient, close reading; perhaps no better example of Hemingway’s distinctive prose style exists. Here’s how it begins:
The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen
saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.
Read the rest here. The story also can be found in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. For helpful commentary on the story, check out this Dish-featured essay. Peruse revious SSFSs here.
(Photo of Hemingway fishing in Michigan in 1916, via Wikimedia Commons)
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