Hemingway's Dark Night: Catholic Influences and Intertextualities in the Work of Ernest Hemingway

Speaking in 1957, Evelyn Waugh commented that Hemingway was "really at heart a Catholic author."

In this groundbreaking study, Matthew Nickel explores Hemingway's Catholic faith through close scrutiny of his fiction and other writings. Using previously unpublished Hemingway letters, Nickel reveals how Hemingway's profound sacramental sense of ritual, pilgrimage and sacrifice informed his work ... and his life.

"Matthew Nickel is a thorough and careful scholar. He has delved beneath the surface and has found a treasure trove of meaning. This book will enrich every reader’s understanding of Hemingway, the man and his work." - Valerie Hemingway, author of Running with the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways

"Nickel's scholarship is impeccable, thoroughgoing and perspicacious. ... A cutting-edge study of the most urgent concerns of one of our greatest writers." - H.R. Stoneback, Distinguished Professor English, SUNY New Paltz

"Nickel has written a very strong Catholic reading of all of Hemingway, grounded in lucid textuality and exhaustive research." - Allen Josephs, past president of the Hemingway Foundation and Society, author of Ritual and Sacrifice in the Corrida

MATTHEW NICKEL holds a PhD in literature from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His writing on American and British literature has appeared in journals and scholarly volumes such as North Dakota Quarterly, Ernest Hemingway in Context, Reading Roberts: Prospect and Retrospect, and Durrell and the City: Collected Essays on Place. He is also a poet and editor. His most recent anthology of poetry is Kentucky: Poets of Place.