The Dangerous Summer
From the Introduction
This is a book about death written by a lusty sixty-year-old man who had reason to fear that his own death was imminent. It is also a loving account of his return to those heroic days when he was young and learning about life in the bull rings of Spain.
In the summer of 1952 Life magazine headquarters in Tokyo dispatched a courier to the front lines in Korea with an intoxicating message. After prowling the mountainous terrain along which desultory action was taking place, he found me at a forward post with a small detachment of Marines.
"Life is engaged in a tremendous venture," he told me in conspiratorial whispers. "We're going to devote an entire issue to one manuscript. And what makes the attempt so daring, it's fiction."
"By who?"
"Ernest Hemingway."
The name exploded in the cavelike foxhole with such force, such imagery, that I was instantly hooked. I had always admired Hemingway, considered him our best writer and certainly the man who had set free the English sentence and the crisp vocabulary. As I wandered about the world I constantly met foreign writers who went out of their way ... read full excerpt from: The Dangerous Summer ebook
