The truth in the morning light
The Truth in Morning Light ( Originally True At First Light ) is a non-fictional book by Ernest Hemingway . The manuscript was published in 1999 by his son Patrick Hemingway at Charles Scribner's Sons . For the German book market was the work of Werner Schmitz in the Rowohlt publishing house translated.
Creation and publication
Hemingway went on a second safari in Africa in 1953 and decided to translate his experiences into literature while the trip was still going on. He had already done this in the 1930s with The Green Hills of Africa . He wrote the work until 1954, when work finally stalled. In the 1950s, Hemingway wrote many manuscripts, all of which he did not fully complete, let alone prepare for publication.
The manuscript of The Truth in the Morning Light was in Hemingway's estate and given to the John F. Kennedy Library by his widow, Mary Hemingway, in the 1970s . In a roundabout way, it finally fell into the hands of Patrick Hemingway in the 1990s, who prepared it for a publication that finally took place in 1999 (38 years after the author's suicide). Patrick Hemingway is said to have shortened the manuscript by over half in order to streamline the plot and also to emphasize the fictional elements of the work.
The Truth in the Morning Light was published in 1999. The work received mostly negative or at most lukewarm reviews from the national and international specialist press and sparked the controversial discussion about whether one should publish works by an author from the estate; especially if they would significantly damage the author's reputation. Ralph Blumenthal of the New York Times said of the work that it was inconsistent with previous non-fiction (or autobiographical fiction) works, and he doubted that the author would have wanted it to be his last published work. There is much to suggest that Hemingway never wanted to publish the manuscript.
However, commercially the book was a success and made it onto the New York Times bestseller list.
Under Kilimanjaro
In 2005 a second, longer version of the manuscript was published under the direction of Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming under the title Under Kilimanjaro . This version won an Eric Hoffer Award in 2007 and received more favorable reviews, although it has not yet been translated into German.
Content and genre
The book is about a hunting safari in Africa in 1953. Between the various hunting trips, Hemingway deals with topics such as marriage , the relationships between foreign hunters and local people, and writing. There are digressions about various writers and Hemingway's time in Paris in the 1920s. Hemingway's writer's block is also discussed. In contrast to The Green Hills of Africa , the focus is not necessarily on hunting. There are entire chapters that deal only with the locals and the narrator's relationship with them. A lion hunt takes up the greater part of the work; because Mary, the wife of the protagonist, has been following a lion for a long time, which she will eventually kill.
At the beginning of the book, the so-called Mau-Mau War takes place, which threatens the camp and which the Hemingways only survive because their hunting companions and servants do not join the rebels.
In professional circles and in Hemingway research there is a lot of discussion about which genre the work should be assigned to. Whether it is a novel or a non-fiction work like the first safari book The Green Hills of Africa . In fact, it is a kind of fictionalized factual report. Names and places were not changed by the author. The first-person narrator is addressed as Ernest or Ernie , which allows one-to-one identification with the author. However, some plot elements are invented, which is why the work cannot be read entirely as a memoire.