SOURCE: Stoneback, H. R. “Freedom and Motion, Place and Placelessness: On the Road in Hemingway's America.” In Hemingway and the Natural World, edited by Robert E. Fleming, pp. 203-19. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Stoneback meditates upon Hemingway's use of geography and myth in his short fiction.

I

The center line of highways was the boundary line of home.

Ernest Hemingway, “The Strange Country”

This essay is concerned with Hemingway's American landscape, actual and symbolic, natural landscape and paysage moralise, and with the roads that wind through it, the roads he figures in his fiction, the roads he follows in fact. One striking pattern in Hemingway's fiction, rarely if ever mentioned in critical commentary, is that so many of his stories begin on the road. For example, the first sentences of “Fathers and Sons” and “Wine of Wyoming” evoke roads and cars, and the...