Ernest Hemingway’s Grand African Safari adventures

American writer Ernest Miller Hemingway’s legacy lives on to this day, but many of his fans are unaware of the fact that this iconic figure was fully immersed in the inspiration from multiple African wildlife adventures.

These excursions through East Africa eventually provided the creative fuel for a handful of his subsequent short stories and novels, including “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Hemingway fell in love with the glorious vistas and wildlife of Africa while also gaining a basic comprehension on Kenyan culture during his first adventure in 1933. After this, he returned home and started writing “The Green Hills of Arica.”

This story focuses on Hemingway’s initial encounter with Africa’s landscapes and culture. Northern Tanzania was where the Nobel Prize winning author camped with his wife Pauline on the banks of Lake Manyara.

It was not long before Hemingway decided to embrace the wild side on his second African safari in 1953. In observing Hemingway’s body of work, it becomes clear that his literary voice was shaped by Africa.

This influential American author later wrote in True at First Light, a fiction and fact based account of his safari experiences; “I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not happy.”