49 pages 1 hour read

Ernest Hemingway

Hills Like White Elephants

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1927

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Introduction

“Hills Like White Elephants”

  • Genre: Fiction; short story
  • Originally Published: 1930
  • Reading Level/Interest: College/adult
  • Structure/Length: approx. 4 pages
  • Protagonist and Central Conflict: A man known as “the American” and a woman named “Jig” sit outside a train station in Madrid. When Jig says the hills in the distance look like white elephants, it sets off bickering between the two about a “perfectly natural” procedure that he wants her to have. Jig is hesitant because once you take “everything” away, it can never come back.
  • Potential Sensitivity Issues: Discussion of abortion

Ernest Hemingway, Author

  • Bio: 1899-1961; part of the “Lost Generation” of modernist writers; American novelist, story-story writer, and journalist; raised in Oak Park, Illinois; reporter for The Kansas City Star for a few months after high school; was an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in World War I; seriously wounded in 1918 and sent home; had four wives; covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist; was present as a journalist with Allied troops during the Normandy landings and liberation of Paris in World War II; lived in Key West, Florida, and in Cuba; survived two plane crashes in two successive days; died by suicide at his home in Idaho; awarded the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Old Man and the Sea and the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature
  • Other Works: In Our Time (1925); The Sun Also Rises (1926); A Farewell to Arms (1929); To Have and Have Not (1937); For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940); The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

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