True at First Light: A Fictional Memoir

By Ernest Hemingway

Both revealing self-portrait and dramatic fictional chronicle of his final African safari, Ernest Hemingway's last unpublished work was written when he returned from Kenya in 1953. Edited by his son Patrick, who accompanied his father on the safari, True at First Light offers rare insights into the legendary American writer.

A blend of autobiography and fiction, the book opens on the day his close friend Pop, a celebrated hunter, leaves Ernest in charge of the safari camp and news arrives of a potential attack from a hostile tribe. Drama continues to build as his wife, Mary pursues the great black–maned lion that has become her obsession. Spicing his depictions of human longings with sharp humor, Hemingway captures the excitement of big-game hunting and the unparalleled beauty of the scenery—the green plains covered with gray mist, zebra and gazelle traversing the horizon, cool dark nights broken by the sounds of the hyena's cry.

As the group at camp help Mary track her prize, she and Ernest suffer the “incalculable casualties of marriage,” and their attempts to love each other well are marred by cruelty, competition and infidelity. Ernest has become involved with Debba, an African girl whom he supposedly plans to take as a second bride. Increasingly enchanted by the local African community, he struggles between the attraction of these two women and the wildly different cultures they represent.

In True at First Light, Hemingway also chronicles his exploits—sometimes hilarious and sometimes poignant—among the African men with whom he has become very close, reminisces about encounters with other writers and his days in Paris and Spain and satirizes, among other things, the role of organized religion in Africa. He also muses on the act of writing itself and the author's role in determining the truth. What is fact and what is fiction? This is a question that was posed by Hemingway's readers throughout his career and is one of his principal subjects here.

Equally adept at evoking the singular textures of the landscape, the thrill of the hunt and the complexities of married life, Hemingway weaves a tale that is rich in laughter, beauty and profound insight. True at First Light is an extraordinary publishing event—a breathtaking final work from one of this nation's most beloved and important writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: May 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781476770086

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. His classic novel The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. His life and accomplishments are explored in-depth in the PBS documentary film from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, Hemingway. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961. 

Reviews for True at First Light

[benjclark · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good. Sort of a watered down Hemingway to read. I don't really remember what gave me that impression, but there it is. I did like that he gave a nod to the fact that he made his memoir "more true" by fictionalizing bits of it.

[mikebiever · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Staged in Africa, Hemingway reflects himself as a hired hunter in the Game Department of the British Administration. The book is set on the African plains, within and out of a hunting camp site established to hunt for an elusive and wanted lion. The book also seems to reflect on the cusp of the change over in Africa from the British (i.e., white man) to the African self-awareness and quest for independence. Though the book does not specifically refer to politics, you get a sense that the story spins on the edge of that change and the reflection of what Africa once was and meant to the likes of someone like the main narrator, Hemingway.