A Pursuit Race

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"A Pursuit Race" is a 1927 short story by American writer Ernest Hemingway. It was published in the collection Men Without Women.

Plot summary

"A Pursuit Race" tells the story of a man, William Campbell, involved in a "pursuit race" with a burlesque show. The story takes place within a single hotel room in Kansas City, where the racer's boss Mr. Turner finds him. It is first made to seem that the racer is drunk, but it is eventually established that the racer is high on heroin, which is revealed when the racer shows his boss track marks on his arm. The boss attempts to help the racer, but eventually leaves the man alone in the hotel room.

Reviews

Tom Stoppard called the opening paragraph one of the best in English, he noted that "This is a piece of writing that mimics its subject matter. It is a paragraph in which a burlesque show is in a pursuit race with a metaphor. And what happens is that the burlesque show catches up on the metaphor and the metaphor has to get down from its bicycle and leave the page."^[1]^[2]
Charles J. Jr. Nolan writing in Studies in Short Fiction (Vol. 34, Issue 4, Fall 1997) writes that it "has its charms. A close reading of the story, informed by our knowledge of the manuscripts, both reveals Hemingway's skill and gives us a new appreciation of this often neglected work.^[1]

Themes

William Campbell embodies the theme of a loser lost to alcohol and heroin. For him and all those like him, life itself has become a pursuit race.^[3]

Adaptation

The story appears as a scene in the 1962 film Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, featuring Dan Dailey as Campbell and Fred Clark as Mr. Turner.^[4]

References

^ ^a ^b Hemingway's Puzzling Pursuit Race Nolan, Charles J. Jr., Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 34, no. 4, fall 1997, p. 481. Retrieved 29/9/2022.
^ Reflections on Ernest Hemingway Retrieved 30/9/2022.
^ Hemingway, the figure of the bicycle, and avant-garde Paris Retrieved 30/9/2022.
^ Film Review Retrieved 30/9/2022.

External links

Full text of "A Pursuit Race" at HathiTrust Digital Library
The full text of A Pursuit Race at Wikisource

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Nonfiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (2005)

Short stories

"Up In Michigan" (1921)
"Indian Camp" (1924)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"Banal Story" (1926)
"Today is Friday" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1927)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"Now I Lay Me" (1927)
"A Simple Enquiry" (1927)
"Ten Indians" (1927)
"An Alpine Idyll" (1927)
"A Pursuit Race" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Natural History of the Dead" (1932)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
"Old Man at the Bridge" (1938)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Story fragments

"On Writing"

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Plays

Today is Friday (1926)
The Fifth Column (1938)

Screenplays

The Spanish Earth (1937 film)

Letters and
journalism

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet
"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story
A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series
To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)
For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1959 TV play 1965 TV series 1984 song
The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 film 1999 animated film
Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) Under My Skin (1950) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977) Soldier's Home (1977) My Old Man (1979) After the Storm (2001) The Garden of Eden (2008) Across the River and into the Trees (2022)