"The Torrents of Spring," a novella published in 1926, is a hilarious satire on the romantic and literary conventions of the Chicago school of literature. It is Hemingway's first long work and was written as a parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter.

Set in northern Michigan, the story concerns two men who work at a pump factory: World War I veteran Yogi Johnson, and writer Scripps O'Neill. Both are searching for the perfect woman, though they disagree over this ideal. The story begins with O'Neill returning home to find that his wife and daughter have left him. O'Neill, desperate for companionship, befriends a British waitress, Diana, and immediately asks her to marry him. She tries to impress him by reading New York Times bestsellers, to no avail. O'Neill leaves her for another waitress, Mandy, who enthralls him with her store of dubious literary anecdotes. 

Yogi Johnson frets that he doesn't desire any woman, even though spring is approaching. He is cured of his impotence when he falls in love with an Indigenous American woman who enters a restaurant clothed only in moccasins. Viewing her, he is overcome by "a new feeling" which he attributes to Mother Nature, and together they "light out for the territories."

It was widely believed that Hemingway wrote The Torrents of Spring to get out of his contract with his publisher, Boni & Liveright. Written in ten days, Hemingway submitted the manuscript early in December 1925. it was rejected by the end of the month and in January 1926, Max Perkins at Scribner's agreed to publish it in addition to Hemingway's future work.

Play sample:

Download our PDF datasheet.