Hills Like White Elephants

By Ernest Hemingway

A couple’s future hangs in the balance as they wait for a train in a Spanish café in this short story by a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning author.

At a small café in rural Spain, a man and woman have a conversation while they wait for their train to Madrid. The subtle, casual nature of their talk masks a more complicated situation that could endanger the future of their relationship.

First published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women, “Hills Like White Elephants” exemplifies Ernest Hemingway’s style of spare, tight prose that continues to win readers over to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781504083768

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. 

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Reviews for Hills Like White Elephants

[TN Gunn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hemingway can say in a four word sentence what some writer's fail to capture in an anthology of work. In this short story, White Elephant, Hemingway gives us something akin to a play but more so a page out of a dashing novel. The question to be considered here: not what they are running to, but what they are fleeing from and why?