Originally commissioned for Life Magazine in 1960, The Dangerous Summer is Ernest Hemingway’s chronicle of a bullfighting season in Spain in the late 1950s. Nearly thirty years previously, Hemingway had written on the subject of bullfighting in his 1932 book Death in the Afternoon. While the earlier work was hailed by many critics, The Dangerous Summer, published nearly 25 years after Hemingway’s death, may be the author’s most neglected book.
Hemingway often omitted material from his work, believing that readers could have a feeling for such omissions, as long as the writer is writing truly enough. Because Hemingway was erudite in many languages and in many areas, however, the missing or omitted material is not always easily accessible to people who are not experts in the area he discusses or who read him many decades later.
In Hemingway’s The Dangerous Summer: The Complete Annotations, Miriam Mandel has retrieved the historical, literary, biographical, technical and cultural backgrounds that underlie Hemingway’s last narrative, particularly those elements associated with bullfighting, a topic unfamiliar to most readers today. These annotations offer detailed information about the animals, people, and cultural constructs mentioned in The Dangerous Summer.
In the comprehensive Introduction, Mandel discusses the origins and development of bullfighting, gives some background of Spanish events in the twentieth century, and reviews Hemingway’s life-long involvement with Spain. Along with her earlier book, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations (Scarecrow Press, 2002), this volume provides all the historic, literary, taurine and Spanish backgrounds needed to understand the large body of Hemingway’s fiction that is set in Spain or deals with Spanish topics.