The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber
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"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway set in Africa published in 1936 concurrently with "The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
[edit] Description
The initially cowardly Francis Macomber and his symbolically castrating wife are being guided on a large-game hunt by a professional hunter and code initiate, Robert Wilson. Macomber repeatedly shows his cowardice and is verbally chastised by his wife, who sarcastically responds to his assertiveness late in the story with the line, "You've gotten awfully brave, awfully suddenly." Ironically, Macomber has, in fact, finally become truly fearless, as he demonstrates by standing his ground and firing at a charging buffalo, "shooting a touch high each time and hitting the heavy horns, splintering and chipping them like hitting a slate roof...." Margot grabs a gun, ostensibly to get the buffalo, and shoots Macomber straight in the head. Robert Wilson, having witnessed the drastic change of character and self-confidence that had occurred within Macomber just in several minutes, tells "he would have left you too" to Macomber's desperate wife. And even though the hunter himself states that Macomber's death is an accident, still, it is unclear whether his wife had shot him on purpose or by accident.
| 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 | Winner Take Nothing | The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories | The Snows of Kilimanjaro | The Essential Hemingway | The Hemingway Reader | The Nick Adams Stories | The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | The Collected Stories |
