Hemingway relies on the basic value of “grace under pressure” (his motto for his own life) when creating Characters who are faced with death. He has instilled this value in Harry and in many of the heroes in his novels and short stories.
Hemingway uses the African Setting in other writings. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (Cosmopolitan, September, 1936) also deals with the death of a man on safari. Two books, Green Hills of Africa (1935) and the posthumously released True at First Light (1999), recount Hemingway’s adventures in Africa. Both are basically nonfiction, but Hemingway used fiction techniques in dialogue and organization and changed names of people on the safaris.
Although “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was first published in Esquire magazine, two years later it was included in an anthology, The Fifth Column, and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). The Fifth Column was Hemingway’s play about the Spanish Civil War. Later this story was included in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and Other Stories (1961) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987).
In the Esquire story, Hemingway referred to F. Scott Fitzgerald as the writer who was taken in by the rich and thought they were so very different from him. Fitzgerald asked Hemingway not to pick on him and to change the name if he published the story again. In subsequent editions of the story, Fitzgerald’s name was changed to Julian.
“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was made into a movie of the same name that was released in 1952. The lavish big-budget film starred Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Susan Hayward. As Peck lies on the cot in the African encampment, he relives his life in flashbacks. Scenes show bohemian Paris, the battlefields of Spain, and the plains of Africa.
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