Ernest Hemingway Non-Fiction books in order

Reading order

Hemingway’s non-fiction covers the subjects that filled his life outside of novel-writing: bullfighting, big-game hunting, deep-sea fishing, war, and the craft of writing itself. These books show a different side of his work, though they carry the same direct, observation-heavy style as his fiction.

Death in the Afternoon (1932) remains the most thorough book on Spanish bullfighting written in English, mixing technical analysis with personal philosophy. Green Hills of Africa (1935) is an account of a safari that also becomes an extended meditation on writing and literary competition. Both books blur the line between reportage and literature in ways that were unusual for their time. His journalism, collected in volumes like Dateline Toronto and Articles for The Kansas City Star, shows the newspaper training that shaped his famously short sentences and active verbs.

Several of these non-fiction volumes focus on specific aspects of Hemingway’s interests. Hemingway on Fishing and Hemingway on War pull selections from across his career to create thematic collections. Ernest Hemingway on Writing gathers his comments about the craft from letters, interviews, and published work. Under Kilimanjaro (2005), published long after his death, is a fictionalized account of an African safari that sat unfinished in his papers for decades.