Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer

"Originally commissioned for Life magazine in 1960, The Dangerous Summer is Ernest Hemingway's chronicle of a bullfighting season in Spain in the late 1950s. Nearly thirty years before, Hemingway had written on the subject of bullfighting in his 1932 book Death in the Afternoon. While the earlier work was hailed by many critics, The Dangerous Summer, published twenty-four years after Hemingway's death, may be the author's most neglected book." "Hemingway often omitted material from his work, believing that readers would still understand the material, as long as "the writer is writing truly enough." Because Hemingway was erudite in many languages and in many subject areas, however, the "missing" or omitted" material is not always easily accessible to those who are not specialists or who read him many decades later." "In Hemingway's The Dangerous Summer: The Complete Annotations, Miriam Mandel examines the historical, literary, biographical, technical, and cultural backgrounds that underlie Hemingway's last narrative, particularly those elements associated with bullfighting, a topic unfamiliar to most modern readers. These annotations offer detailed information about the animals, people, and cultural constructs discussed in The Dangerous Summer. In the comprehensive introduction, Mandel discusses the origins and development of bullfighting, provides the background of Spanish events in the twentieth century, and reviews Hemingway's lifelong involvement with Spain."--Jacket.