Publish Date: Oct. 18, 1937
Cover Story: All Stones End
How TIME Covered the News: 1937 found Ernest Hemingway at a crossroads. Already exalted for marshaling some of the “hardest-hitting prose of the century,” the author’s initial streak of hits (1926’s The Sun Also Rises, 1927’s Men Without Women and 1929’s Farewell to Arms) had been followed by a noticeable slump (1932’s Death in the Afternoon and 1935’s Green Hills of Africa). On the eve of the release of To Have and Have Not, a smuggling drama that takes place between Cuba and Florida, TIME honored Hemingway on the cover.
“Death, as it must to all Hemingway stories, has not yet come to finish Ernest Hemingway’s. At 39, in life’s prime, he has chosen to be in the midst of death. Madrid, whence last fortnight he cabled a first dispatch to the N. Y. Times, was what he described as quiet; but a shell hit the hotel where he was shaving one morning. Whether his remaining chapters are to reach a further climax, are to be torn off unfinished or peter out in a dull decline, time alone can tell.”