mimi (personal pronoun) I.
mingi (adjective) Many.
moja (noun) One.
moran (noun) A Masai word equivalent to askari.
mtoto (noun) Child.
mwanamuki (noun) Woman.
Mzee (noun) Old man.
mzuri (adjective) Good.
ndege (noun) Bird, aircraft.
ndio (interjection) Yes.
Ngoma (noun) Dance.
nyanyi (noun) Baboon.
panga (noun) Machete, sword, cutlass.
poli poli (adverb) Slowly.
pombe (noun) Homemade beer.
posho (noun) Cornmeal.
risasi (noun) Bullet.
samaki (noun) Fish.
sana (adverb) Very.
shamba (noun) Small cultivated field.
shauri (noun) Affair, business, concern.
simba (noun) Lion.
tembo (noun) Elephant. Can also mean hard liquor.
tu (adjective) Only, just.
uchawi (noun) Witchcraft, in the bad sense.
Ukambani (phrase) In the country of the Kamba tribe.
wanawaki (noun) Plural form of mwanamuke, woman.
watu (noun) People.
Editor’s Acknowledgments
Thank you, Michael Katakis, as Hemingway literary rights manager, for myself and my brothers, for sustaining our belief that this job was worth doing.
Thanks as well to the staff of the Kennedy Library and especially Megan Desnoyers and Stephen Plotkin, whose archival professionalism has been such a help to all who have had the privilege to work with the manuscripts of Ernest Hemingway.
Thanks also to the editorial staff of Scribner and especially Charles Scribner III and Gillian Blake for their help to a grateful amateur.
Special thanks to my wife, Carol, who shares my belief that writing is important and that one word is worth a thousand pictures.
About the Author
Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, and began his writing career with The Kansas City Star in 1917. During the First World War he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front but was invalided home, having been seriously wounded while serving with the Red Cross. In 1921 Hemingway settled in Paris, where he became part of the expatriate circle of Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. His first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris in 1923 and was followed by the short story collection In Our Time, which marked his American debut in 1925. With the appearance of The Sun Also Rises in 1926, Hemingway became not only the voice of the “lost generation” but the preeminent writer of his time. This was followed by Men Without Women in 1927, when Hemingway returned to the United States, and his novel of the Italian front, A Farewell to Arms (1929). In the 1930s, Hemingway settled in Key West, and later in Cuba, but he traveled widely—to Spain, Italy, and Africa—and wrote about his experiences in Death in the Afternoon (1932), his classic treatise on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting in Africa. Later he reported on the Spanish Civil War, which became the background for his brilliant war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), hunted U-boats in the Caribbean, and covered the European front during the Second World War. Hemingway’s most popular work, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and in 1954 Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration.” One of the most important influences on the development of the short story and novel in American fiction, Hemingway has seized the imagination of the American public like no other twentieth-century author. He died in Ketchum, Idaho, in 1961. His other works include The Torrents of Spring (1926), Winner Take Nothing (1933), To Have and Have Not (1937), The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938), Across the River and Into the Trees (1950), and posthumously, A Moveable Feast (1964), Islands in the Stream (1970), The Dangerous Summer (1985), and The Garden of Eden (1986).
Reading Group Guide
True at First Light
1) Hemingway completed just one draft of True at First Light, and after his death it remained under lock and key for decades. Did these circumstances affect the way you read the book? How should True at First Light be judged within Hemingway’s complete canon of work? If he had finished writing and editing the book himself, in what ways might it have been different?
2) Perhaps the most controversial aspect of True at First Light is Hemingway’s purported “marriage” to Debba. Do you believe that this relationship is truthfully rendered, or one of the “fictionalized” elements of this memoir? Could Debba be an amalgamation of a few different women? A metaphor for Hemingway’s love of Africa itself?
3) On the surface, Hemingway perpetuates the notion that he and Mary are very happy. They frequently take great pains to reassure one another that they are content. Are they trying to convince themselves they are still in love? If so, why? Is their bickering a sign that they are unhappy, or is this just the way they communicate? Discuss his assertion that “love is a terrible thing…[and] fidelity does not exist nor ever is implied except at the first marriage”.
4) Hemingway often mocks the white man’s presence in Africa, noting how many are willing to pay inflated prices for an authentic African hunt, and even joking that a Hilton should be built for the comfort of such people. Does Hemingway despise these casual hunters and the changes they bring to Africa? Does he realize that, in the eyes of many, he himself is one of those people? How does he feel about his own role as an outsider in Africa, and the impact of his own presence there? Does he become more aware of it as the novel progresses?
5) The Informer is one of the book’s most interesting characters, universally despised by nearly everyone but Hemingway. Why is the author so charitable to the Informer? What does this character represent to Hemingway and to the others at camp? Is the information he gives Hemingway useful in any real way? Discuss Hemingway’s observation that the Informer will “betray anyone betrayable” for money.