Across The River and Into The Trees - Background and Publication

Background and Publication

Ernest Hemingway met his friend A. E. Hotchner in 1948 when Hotchner, recently released from the Air Force, took a job with Cosmopolitan Magazine as a "commissioned agent." Hemingway's name was on the list of authors Hotchner was to contact so he went to Cuba, asked for a meeting (Hemingway took him to a bar) and for a short article. Hemingway did not write an article, but he did submit his next novel Across the River and into the Trees to Hotchner which Cosmopolitan serialized in five installments. The protagonist was based on Hemingway's friend Charles T. Lanham.

From 1949 to 1950 Hemingway worked on the book in four different places: he started writing during the winter of 1949 in Italy at Cortina D'Ampezzo; continued upon his return home to Cuba; finished the draft in Paris; and completed the revisions in Venice in the winter of 1950. In the fall of 1948 he arrived in Italy and visited Fossalta where in 1918 he had been wounded. A month later, while duck hunting with an Italian aristocrat he met 18-year-old Adriana Ivancich. He and his fourth wife Mary then went to Cortina to ski: she broke her ankle and, bored, Hemingway began the draft of the book. Hemingway himself then became ill with an eye-infection and was hospitalized. In the spring he went to Venice where he met Adriana for lunch a few times. In May he returned to Cuba and carried out a protracted correspondence with Adriana while working on the manuscript. In the autumn he had returned to Europe and at the Ritz in Paris he finished the draft. Once done, he and Mary went again to Cortina to ski: for the second time she broke her ankle and he contracted an eye infection. By February the first serialization was published in Cosmopolitan and in March the Hemingways returned to Paris and then home to Cuba where the final proofs were read before the September publication.

Cosmopolitan Magazine serialized Across the River and Into the Trees from February to June 1950. Adriana Ivancich designed the dustjacket of the first edition, although her original artwork was redrawn by the Scribner's promotions department. The novel was published by Scribner's on 7 September 1950 with a first edition print run of 75,000, after a publicity campaign that hailed the novel as Hemingway's first book since the publication of his 1940 Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.