The Torrents of Spring

The spring that turned Hemingway into a satirist and a literary free agent.

Ernest Hemingway's second published work is a hilarious and biting parody of the Chicago school of literature, written in just ten days as a deliberate spoof of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter. Subtitled "A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race," this novella marked Hemingway's first long work and served as the unlikely key that freed him from his publishing contract with Boni & Liveright, allowing him to sign with Scribner's, where he would publish The Sun Also Rises later the same year.

Set in the small towns of northern Michigan, the story follows two men working at a pump factory: Scripps O'Neil, a writer whose wife and daughter have mysteriously abandoned him, and Yogi Johnson, a World War I veteran who finds himself strangely indifferent to women as spring approaches. Scripps, desperate for companionship, marries a British waitress named Diana, only to leave her for another, Mandy, whose fabricated literary anecdotes captivate him. Yogi, meanwhile, wanders into a Native American men's club and falls in love with a woman who enters a restaurant wearing only moccasins. The plot, like much of the book, is deliberately absurd, and deliberately funny.

This is Hemingway at his most irreverent and unguarded: a young writer lampooning the very literary establishment that had nurtured him, mocking the styles of D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein along the way. F. Scott Fitzgerald called it "the best comic book ever written by an American." Hadley Richardson, Hemingway's first wife, found it "nasty." John Dos Passos thought it funny but worried about the consequences. The Torrents of Spring is slight, savage, and surprisingly delightful—a rare glimpse into Hemingway's early career as a storyteller and stylist.

• Hemingway's first long work, written in ten days and published in 1926

• A brilliant parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter and the Chicago school of literature

• Essential reading for Hemingway completists and anyone interested in the literary feuds of the Lost Generation

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

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A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that sometimes the best way to honor a friend is to mock him mercilessly.

About the Author

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was an American novelist, short story writer, and journalist, widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he served as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War I. After the war, he moved to Paris, where he became part of the "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His major works include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1952), which won the Pulitzer Prize. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Hemingway died by suicide in 1961 and is buried in Ketchum, Idaho. The Torrents of Spring remains his least-known novel—but for those who seek it out, a strange and sparkling curiosity.