Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Alice Hall Petry

Critical Essay by Alice Hall Petry

SOURCE: "Voice Out of Africa: A Possible Oral Source for Hemingway's 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'," in The Hemingway Review, Vol. IV, No. 2, Spring, 1985, pp. 7-11.

In the following essay, Petry uncovers a link between Hemingway 's story and the reminscences of an early female aviator.

Ever since it was first published in Esquire in August of 1936, Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" has consistently enjoyed popular acclaim and scholarly attention. A generous portion of the interest which the story continues to generate focuses on its possible sources—more precisely, the sources of the epigraph and the various elements within it (such as the frozen leopard). But the long-running epigraph controversy has tended to overshadow an equally fundamental critical problem in "The Snows": the source of the dramatic situation Hemingway depicts of a woman attempting to comfort a dying, delirious man. Is this purely Hemingway's imaginative rendering of his...
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