Across The River And Into The Trees Hemingway Analysis

American author Ernest Hemingway’s novel Across the River and into the Trees was his first published fiction since 1940’s For Whom the Bell Tolls with his only book in the interim being 1942’s anthology, Men at War, a collection of war stories by various authors for which he served as editor. Although Hemingway worked on the text in the late 1940s while he was in Cuba and France, Across the River and into the Trees was not published until 1950. It was first published in serialized form in Cosmopolitan magazine in the early part of 1950. It was Hemingway’s first experience receiving negative reviews for one of his novels. The reception did not, however, deter the public from embracing it, as it became his first and only novel to reach the number one spot on The New York Times Best Seller list, spending seven weeks in the position. In subsequent decades, critical response has softened and it has come to be viewed as a significant work of the author. The title comes from the final statement of United States Civil War general, Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson. The Confederate leader said, “Let us cross over the river and rest under the …show more content…
He then makes his way to the backseat of the staff car and dies of a heart attack. Much of the critical opposition to Across the River and into the Trees suggested that the novel did not have much of a plot. In response to such statements Hemingway pointed out that in fact he had included such events as a military breakthrough in Normandy, the taking of Paris, as well as the Hurtgen Forest battle that he was witness to firsthand when he was a war correspondent. In fact, there are the stories of war that the colonel tells the countess that bolster the plot even though the main story focuses on the affair of the two main characters and the premature death of