Ernest Hemingway - Islands in the Stream

Hemingways

Big Book About the Sea

ISLANDS IN

THE STREAM

With a variety of themes and moods, dynamic action scenes andunexpectedlya rich and ribald sense of humor, ISLANDS IN THE STREAM tells a story closely resembling Hemingways life.

Thomas Hudson is a good painter. His solitary life of artistic self-discipline on the lush Caribbean island of Bimini is interrupted by a visit from his three lively sons. In a thrilling descriptive scene, David, the middle boy, shows his courage when attacked by a shark and his endurance while fighting a thousand-pound swordfish. It is an initiation into manhood.

Years later, Hudson is in Cuba mourning the death of his oldest son. A chance encounter with his first wife renews their passionate commitment to each other.

In the final episode, a masterpiece of action and adventure, Hudson captains an improvised Q-boat hunting down the survivors of a German submarine. This assignment requires a kind of discipline wholly different from his creative life as a painterbut no less important to his integrity. It is Thomas Hudsons most important battle.

I dont have to be proud of it. I only have to do it well.Thomas Hudson

ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

A complete, well-rounded novel, a contender with his very best ... It is 100-proof Old Ernest!

The New York Times Book Review

There are brilliant descriptions in the famous Hemingway style ... When he describes the close bonds of love and hate between a group of men who are engaged in a tight and dangerous adventure with death as the ultimate stake, he remains unbeatable in his craft.

Maxwell Geismar, Chicago Sun-Times Showcase

Remarkably alive with voice and muscle ... Hemingway never displayed a brawnier wit ... There are memories of Paris as pungent and vivid as anything in A Moveable Feast. And the fishing episode ... is only slightly less dazzling than Santiagos struggle in The Old Man and the Sea.Charles Lee, Philadelphia Bulletin

Incredibly moving and powerful.

Robert Kirsch. Los Angeles Times Calendar

This book contains some of the best of Hemingways descriptions of nature: the waves breaking white and green on the reef off the coast of Cuba; the beauty of the morning on the deep water; the hermit crabs and land crabs and ghost crabs; a big barracuda stalking mullet; a heron flying with his white wings over the green water; the ibis and flamingoes and spoonbills, the last of these beautiful with the sharp rose of their color; the mosquitoes in clouds from the marshes; the water that curled and blew under the lash of the wind; the sculpture that the wind and sand had made of a piece of driftwood, gray and sanded and embedded in white, floury sand.

Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker

Many of the episodes contain the most exciting and effective writing Hemingway has ever done.

John W. Aldridge, Saturday Review

Marvelously alive, moving quickly and showing glimmers of joy and humor that you might never have noticed in his work before.

Bruce Cook, National Observer

A part of American literary history, and his fans must read it, as they read all the rest with varying degrees of emotion, exhilaration and just plain joy.

William Hogan, San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

An immensely touching book.

Hal Burton, Newsday

I fell in love with the book at first sight ... caught up by the Hemingway voice (never truer nor more relaxed) ... A lovely, loving work, deeply sad and deeply felt.

Mary Ellin Barrett, Cosmopolitan

As haunting as any fiction that Hemingway ever wrote.

Nicholas Joost, St Louis Globe-Democrat

The work of an estimable writer ... Hemingways voice is still effective, hauntingly so.

Bernard Oldsey, The Nation

Books by Ernest Hemingway

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES

*BY-LINE: ERNEST HEMINGWAY

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

*THE FIFTH COLUMN AND FOUR UNPUBLISHED

STORIES OF THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS

THE GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA

THE HEMINGWAY READER

IN OUR TIME

*ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

MEN AT WAR

MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

*A MOVEABLE FEAST

THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

THE SHORT STORIES OF ERNEST HEMINGWAY

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO AND OTHER STORIES

THE SUN ALSO RISES

TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT

THE TORRENTS OF SPRING

WINNER TAKE NOTHING

*Published by Bantam Books

ISLANDS

IN THE

STREAM

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

A NATIONAL GENERAL COMPANY

This low-priced Bantam Book

has been completely reset in a type face

designed for easy reading, and was printed

from new plates. It contains the complete

text of the original hard-cover edition .

NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

ISLANDS IN THE STREAM

A Bantam Book / published by arrangement with

Charles Scribners Sons

PRINTING HISTORY

Scribners edition published October 1970

2nd printing ..... October 1970

Book-of-the-Month Club edition published October 1970

Bantam edition published February 1972

Excerpts appeared in ESQUIRE September 1970

Map by Samuel H. Bryant

Copyright 1970 by Charles Scribners Sons

All rights reserved.

Copyright 1970 by Mary Hemingway.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by

mimeograph or any other means, without permission.

For information address: Charles Scribners Sons,

597 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017.

Published simultaneously in the united States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc., a National General company. Its trade-mark, consisting of the words Bantam Books and the portrayal of a bantam, Is registered in the United States Patent Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10019.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Charles Scribner, Jr. and I worked together preparing this book for publication from Ernests original manuscript. Beyond the routine chores of correcting spelling and punctuation, we made some cuts in the manuscript, I feeling that Ernest would surely have made them himself. The book is all Ernests. We have added nothing to it.

MARY HEMINGWAY

The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship. It was shaded by tall coconut palms that were bent by the trade wind and on the ocean side you could walk out of the door and down the bluff across the white sand and into the Gulf Stream. The water of the Stream was usually a dark blue when you looked out at it when there was no wind. But when you walked out into it there was just the green light of the water over that floury white sand and you could see the shadow of any big fish a long time before he could ever come in close to the beach.

It was a safe and fine place to bathe in the day but it was no place to swim at night. At night the sharks came in close to the beach, hunting in the edge of the Stream and from the upper porch of the house on quiet nights you could hear the splashing of the fish they hunted and if you went down to the beach you could see the phosphorescent wakes they made in the water. At night the sharks had no fear and everything else feared them. But in the day they stayed out away from the clear white sand and if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.