The Torrents of Spring

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The Torrents of Spring is an Ernest Hemingway novel published in 1924.

Torrents of Spring is technically Hemingway's first novel, though The Sun Also Rises is his first major success. Hemingway wrote this 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."

The hero of this novel suffers from impotence, while the hero of The Sun Also Rises suffered from an undescribed war wound that prevented intercourse. 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.