The Torrents of Spring
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The Torrents of Spring is an Ernest Hemingway novel published in 1925.
Hemingway, who had completed but not published The Sun Also Rises, wrote this second novel in a way that would force his publisher, Horace Liverwright, to refuse it and thus break Hemingway's contract. The book parodies Liverwright's star author, Sherwood Anderson, and Hemingway knew Liverwright would never accept it. Hemingway was then able to take up a more lucrative offer from Scribner's.
The novel relates the tale of the intersecting lives of World War I veteran Yogi Johnson and writer Scripps O'Neill, both of whom work at a pump factory. Both are searching for the perfect woman. O'Neill takes mescaline and hallucinates that he is President of Mexico. Johnson is cured of his impotence when, viewing a naked squaw, he is overcome by "a new feeling" which he immediately attribute to Mother Nature, and together he and the squaw "light out for the territories."
It may be noted that the hero of this novel suffers from impotence, while the hero of The Sun Also Rises suffered from a missing penis. Many of Hemingway's short stories from this period (such as God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen) also treat themes of sexual dysfunction.
Though primarily a send-up of Anderson's poorly-esteemed negro novel Dark Laughter, the literary proclivities of American and British close to Anderson, such as D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, are wound into the monkey-barrel of satire and parody.
| Ernest Hemingway Books |
| Novels: The Torrents of Spring | The Sun Also Rises (Fiesta) | A Farewell to Arms | To Have and Have Not | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Across the River and Into the Trees | The Old Man and the Sea | Adventures of a Young Man | Islands in the Stream | The Garden of Eden |
| Non Fiction: Death in the Afternoon | Green Hills of Africa | The Dangerous Summer | A Moveable Feast | Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961 | Under Kilimanjaro |
| Short Story Books: Three Stories and Ten Poems | In Our Time | Men Without Women | The Snows of Kilimanjaro | Winner Take Nothing | The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories | The Essential Hemingway | The Hemingway Reader | The Nick Adams Stories | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | Collected Stories |
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