Ernest Hemingway Books in Order: Every Novel, Story Collection and Posthumous Work
Hemingway Books in Order: The Short Answer
Ernest Hemingway published seven novels, six story collections and two works of non-fiction in his lifetime. Four more novels and several other books appeared after his death in 1961 — and those come with a caveat worth understanding before you buy one.
The novels he published himself:
- The Torrents of Spring (1926)
- The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- A Farewell to Arms (1929) Buy a used copy
- To Have and Have Not (1937)
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
- The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Published after his death:
- Islands in the Stream (1970)
- The Garden of Eden (1986)
- True at First Light (1999)
- Under Kilimanjaro (2005)
Where to Start
Three defensible answers, and they suit different readers.
Start with the short stories
The most common advice, and probably the best. Hemingway's technique is at its most concentrated at short length, and if it doesn't work on you at ten pages it won't work on you at four hundred. A good sequence: Hills Like White Elephants, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, The Killers, Indian Camp, then The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.
Start with The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
About 130 pages, plainly told, and the book the Nobel citation singled out. The caveat: it's late, atypical and semi-allegorical, so it gives you an incomplete picture of what the rest of the work is like.
Start with The Sun Also Rises (1926)
The case for going straight in. It's the novel that made his name, it defines the Lost Generation, and the mature style is already fully formed — he was twenty-seven. It's the right first book for someone who wants to understand why Hemingway matters rather than to sample him gently. It asks you to spend 250 pages with people who drink a great deal and behave badly.
A full order, if you're working through everything
Short stories → The Sun Also Rises (1926) → A Farewell to Arms (1929) → For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) → The Old Man and the Sea (1952) → A Moveable Feast (1964, which lands better once you know the Paris material) → To Have and Have Not (1937) → the posthumous novels → the non-fiction. Leave Across the River and into the Trees and The Torrents of Spring for last.
The Novels, With Context
| Title | Year | Approx. pages | Subject |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Torrents of Spring | 1926 | ~120 | A parody of Sherwood Anderson, written in about ten days |
| The Sun Also Rises | 1926 | ~256 | Expatriates in Paris and Pamplona |
| A Farewell to Arms | 1929 | ~336 | The Italian front in the First World War |
| To Have and Have Not | 1937 | — | Key West and Cuba in the Depression |
| For Whom the Bell Tolls | 1940 | ~480 | The Spanish Civil War |
| Across the River and into the Trees | 1950 | — | A dying colonel in Venice |
| The Old Man and the Sea | 1952 | ~130 | A Cuban fisherman and a marlin |
The two majors are the three in the middle: The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, with The Old Man and the Sea alongside them on the strength of the Nobel and the Pulitzer.
The two weakest, by general agreement: Across the River and into the Trees was badly received on publication and has never recovered. The Torrents of Spring is a ten-day joke at another writer's expense — of biographical interest more than literary. Fitzgerald, for what it's worth, called it a masterpiece.
A note on The Old Man and the Sea: it appeared first in Life magazine on September 1, 1952. That issue sold 5.3 million copies in two days. The Scribner hardcover followed a week later.
The Posthumous Books — Read This Before You Buy One
This is the section most reading guides skip, and it changes what you're actually holding.
Hemingway died on July 2, 1961, leaving a large quantity of unfinished manuscript. Every book published under his name since then was selected, arranged, cut and sometimes titled by somebody else. He did not finish, approve or authorise any of them.
- A Moveable Feast (1964) — assembled by his widow Mary Hemingway. She chose the running order, picked among competing drafts, supplied the title and built the famous closing passage out of fragments.
- Islands in the Stream (1970) — prepared by Mary Hemingway with Charles Scribner Jr. The manuscript was rough but largely complete; the editors renamed all three sections.
- The Garden of Eden (1986) — edited by Tom Jenks, and the most heavily cut. The manuscript ran roughly 200,000 words across 48 chapters; the published book is about 70,000 words in 30. Something like two-thirds was removed, including an entire subplot. One critic called the result a literary crime. Harold Bloom nonetheless put the novel in his Western Canon.
- True at First Light (1999) — edited by his son Patrick, who cut an 800-page African manuscript roughly in half. Joan Didion objected in print that publishing unfinished work denies the writer's whole job, which is to finish things.
- Under Kilimanjaro (2005) — the fuller scholarly text of that same African manuscript, edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. It is not a separate book from True at First Light — they're two editions of the same material, which surprises a lot of buyers.
None of this means the posthumous books aren't worth reading. Islands in the Stream and The Garden of Eden both have serious admirers. It means you should know you're reading a book shaped substantially by editors working from drafts.
A Moveable Feast: which edition?
A genuine buying decision, since both are in print.
The 1964 edition is Mary Hemingway's. It's the one with sixty years of readers and quotations behind it, and it's the better default.
The Restored Edition (first published 2009) was edited by his grandson Seán Hemingway. It reorders the sketches, adds ten previously unpublished ones in a separate section, restores material about Hadley Richardson and their son, and ends differently. It also softens the portrait of Pauline Pfeiffer — and Seán Hemingway is Pauline's grandson, which is the crux of the scholarly objection to it.
Neither is definitive, because Hemingway never finished the book. Start with 1964. If you love it, the Restored Edition is a genuinely interesting second read.
The Short Stories
If you own one Hemingway book, make it The Complete Short Stories: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987). It collects the famous First Forty-Nine plus 21 more — around seventy pieces — and every story anyone is likely to ask you for is in it.
Where the famous ones first appeared:
| Story | Collection | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Indian Camp | In Our Time | 1925 |
| Big Two-Hearted River | In Our Time | 1925 |
| Soldier's Home | In Our Time | 1925 |
| The Killers | Men Without Women | 1927 |
| Hills Like White Elephants | Men Without Women | 1927 |
| A Clean, Well-Lighted Place | Winner Take Nothing | 1933 |
| The Snows of Kilimanjaro | The First Forty-Nine | 1938 |
| The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber | The First Forty-Nine | 1938 |
The 1923–1925 confusion, sorted out
Three books with nearly the same name, and buyers mix them up constantly:
- Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923), Paris — his first book. A tiny edition. A genuine first is a serious rarity, not a reading copy.
- in our time (1924), Paris — lowercase. Eighteen short prose vignettes, no full stories.
- In Our Time (1925), New York — capitalised. Fourteen stories with the 1924 vignettes redistributed between them. This is the one people mean, and it's worth owning separately from the complete edition because it's built as a book — the vignettes structure the whole thing, and that's lost when the stories are scattered through an omnibus.
The Nick Adams Stories (1972) gathers all the Nick Adams material into the order of Nick's life and adds eight previously unpublished pieces — appealing if you want that arc as a continuous story.
The Non-Fiction
- Death in the Afternoon (1932) — bullfighting in Spain, and his most direct statement of what he thought writing was for.
- Green Hills of Africa (1935) — a safari, told as narrative.
- A Moveable Feast (1964) — Paris in the twenties, written three decades later. See above on editions.
- The Dangerous Summer (1985) — the 1959 bullfighting rivalry between Ordóñez and Dominguín.
There are also several collections of his journalism — By-Line (1967), Dateline: Toronto (1985) — which are specialist purchases rather than general reading.
The Awards
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1953, for The Old Man and the Sea. The book came out in 1952 and the prize was awarded in 1953 — the Pulitzer runs a year behind publication, which is why you'll see both years quoted. It was his only Pulitzer.
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1954, for “his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” It's the only individual work the citation names.
The Life, Briefly
Born July 21, 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. Started writing professionally at seventeen for the Kansas City Star.
The wound. He volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front, and on July 8, 1918, at Fossalta di Piave, he was badly wounded by mortar fire while handing out supplies in the trenches. He helped Italian soldiers to safety despite his injuries and was decorated for it. He was eighteen. That experience, and his convalescence in Milan, sits directly underneath A Farewell to Arms.
Paris. He moved there in 1921 as a correspondent and fell in with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald. Stein's phrase “the lost generation” became an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, which is how it entered the language.
Key West and Cuba. He settled in Key West in 1928, and from the late 1930s lived mostly at Finca Vigía outside Havana — the house that gives the 1987 complete stories its name.
Spain. He covered the Civil War from 1937 on the Republican side, which produced the play The Fifth Column, several stories and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Africa, 1954. On safari in January he was in two plane crashes in two days. Cracked vertebrae, ruptured kidney and liver, skull fracture, burns. Newspapers worldwide reported him dead, and he had the experience of reading his own obituaries. He never fully recovered — and the Nobel came later the same year.
He died on July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho, aged 61. His papers are now the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, which is where all the posthumous books came from.
On Difficulty
Hemingway isn't hard at the sentence level — short declarative sentences, plain words, almost no subordinate clauses. The difficulty is that the meaning lives in what he leaves out. Readers who expect to be told what a character feels can finish a story genuinely unsure what happened.
Hills Like White Elephants is the standard example: two people at a Spanish railway station discuss something for several pages, and the thing they are discussing is never once named.
So page count is a poor guide here. The Old Man and the Sea is the shortest and the most direct. For Whom the Bell Tolls is the longest at around 480 pages. The Sun Also Rises, at 256, has the best ratio of length to reward for a first novel.
On Screen
The notable ones: A Farewell to Arms (1932, Gary Cooper), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943, Cooper and Ingrid Bergman), To Have and Have Not (1944, Bogart and Bacall, directed by Howard Hawks with a screenplay credit for William Faulkner — the best of the films and the furthest from its book), The Killers (1946, Burt Lancaster; remade 1964 with Lee Marvin), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952, Gregory Peck) and The Old Man and the Sea (1958, Spencer Tracy — which Hemingway disliked).
A new A Farewell to Arms directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Tom Blyth, has been in development since 2023 and was in the market as of mid-2026. No release date has been announced.
What's on the Shelf
Hemingway in used paperback is how most people read him, and it suits the books.
- A Farewell to Arms — $5.20. This is the definitive edition, which includes all of the alternate endings he drafted — there were dozens.
- The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories — $5.20. Ten stories, and about the best short introduction to him there is.
Stock changes weekly, so check what we have in today.
Around Hemingway
We usually have more about him than by him, and some of it is excellent:
- The Paris Wife by Paula McLain — $5.20. The Paris years from Hadley Richardson's side. Read it next to A Moveable Feast and you get two very different accounts of the same marriage.
- Love and Ruin by Paula McLain — $5.57. The same treatment for Martha Gellhorn and the Spanish Civil War years.
- Hemingway's Boat by Paul Hendrickson — $5.46. A National Book Critics Circle finalist, told through the fishing boat Pilar.
- Hemingway's Girl by Erika Robuck — $5.20. The Key West years, in fiction.
- In Love and War on DVD — $3.99. Attenborough's film about the Italian front romance that fed into A Farewell to Arms. Sandra Bullock and Chris O'Donnell.
More in classical literature and general fiction. Free shipping over $15.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many books did Hemingway write?
Seven novels, six story collections and two major works of non-fiction in his lifetime. Four more novels and several other books were published after his death, all edited by others from unfinished manuscripts.
What should I read first?
The short stories, or The Old Man and the Sea if you want something complete in an evening. The Sun Also Rises if you want to start with a major novel.
What is Hemingway's best book?
Critical consensus favours The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls. The Nobel citation named The Old Man and the Sea. Many readers would argue the best writing is in the short stories.
Which Hemingway books were published after he died?
A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Garden of Eden (1986), True at First Light (1999) and Under Kilimanjaro (2005), among others. All were edited by family members or publishers from manuscripts he left unfinished.
Are True at First Light and Under Kilimanjaro different books?
No. They're two editions of the same African manuscript — True at First Light is the abridged trade version, Under Kilimanjaro the fuller scholarly text.
Which edition of A Moveable Feast should I buy?
The 1964 edition for a first read. The 2009 Restored Edition reorders the material and adds ten unpublished sketches, and is worth reading afterward.
Did Hemingway win the Nobel Prize?
Yes, in 1954. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, which was published in 1952.
What's the shortest Hemingway book?
The Old Man and the Sea at around 130 pages — and it's also the most straightforward.
