SOURCE: Lindsay, Creighton. “Hemingway's Nexus of Pastoral and Tragedy.” CLA Journal 43, no. 4 (June 2000): 454-78.

In the following essay, Lindsay suggests that Hemingway fuses the traditions of the pastoral and tragedy in his writing.

Less than three weeks before his death by suicide in the summer of 1961, Ernest Hemingway wrote to the ailing son of a friend that he was “very cheerful about things in general.”¹ The discrepancy between Hemingway's chatty tone and the inner turmoil of his life in his final days stands as a poignant symbol of the ironies and contrasts, the opposition of macho surface and fragile psyche, that we have come to see as so representative of his life and fiction. Hemingway had been staying at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and had enjoyed the countryside that surrounded the town and the nearby Mississippi River, and it is noteworthy that the better part of...