Across the River and Into the Trees
First American edition
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| Author | Ernest Hemingway |
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| Cover artist | Adriana Ivancich |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
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Publication date
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1950 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 320 pp |
Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title derives from the last words of U.S. Civil War Confederate General Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
Hemingway's novel opens with aging Colonel Richard Cantwell duck hunting in Trieste, Italy. It then presents his life in a lengthy flashback, with Cantwell thinking about a young Venetian woman, Renata, and his experiences during World War I.
During a trip to Italy not long before writing the novel, Hemingway had met young Adriana Ivancich, with whom he became infatuated, and he used her as the model for the female character in the novel. The novel's central theme is death, and, more importantly, how death is faced. One biographer and critic sees a parallel between Hemingway's Across the River and Into the Trees and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. The novel is built upon successive layers of symbolism, and as in his other writing, Hemingway employs here his distinctive, spare style (the 'iceberg theory'), where the substance lies below the surface of the plot.
Hemingway himself said of Across the River and into the Trees, "Books start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers."
Written in Italy, Cuba and France in the late 1940s, it was the first of his novels to receive bad press and reviews. It was nonetheless a bestseller in America, spending 7 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller's list in 1950, and was, in fact, Hemingway's only novel to top the list. More recently, since its initial unenthusiastic critical reception, critics and scholars now generally see it as an important addition to the Hemingway canon.
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Wikipedia