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“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” first appeared in Esquire in August 1936. Esquire was—and remains to this day—a popular men’s magazine, which often published work by well-known or up-and-coming writers. Hemingway, who had a close relationship with Esquire and whose work often appeared in the magazine, was already considered one of America’s most famous writers when “The Snows” was published. The story’s reception was positive with both mainstream readers and critics. In fact, the piece was reprinted just one year later in the collection Best American Short Stories, a highly respected annual anthology that has published many of the United States’ best writers since its inception in 1915. “The Snows” was praised by these initial critics and anthologists for the precision of its language—one of Hemingway’s most notable and appreciated skills was his ability to create a work in which no word, line, feeling, or thought was out of place or excessive.
Over the years since the story’s publication, critics have argued over the meaning of the text’s many symbols. Critic Oliver Evans claims in his essay “The Snows of Kilimanjaro: A Revaluation” that many of his fellow critics have likely misinterpreted the significance of the leopard, which is perhaps the most slippery of the metaphorical images Hemingway employs in the text. Evans argues that some of these interpretations—such as the leopard being a reference to Dante’s leopard, which represents materialistic pleasures and debauchery (obstacles in Harry’s writing career and his journey to self-actualization)—are not sufficiently supported by the text. Other interpretations, such as Philip Young’s, seem more possible: Young claims that the preserved leopard represents the immortality that Harry seeks to accomplish via the written word. However, Evans also argues that this reading is too narrow. In his estimation, the leopard represents “life-in-death.” Evans asserts that in much of “The Snows,” Harry is experiencing a death-in-life. He is literally alive, but his loveless marriage, declining creative abilities, and lack of passion make him feel bored, apathetic, and “dead.” His infected, decaying wound is a symbol of this death-in-life. The leopard, meanwhile, represents how Harry achieves salvation via the inverse of this equation. In death, Harry is released from the rot of his life, and therefore finally reaches purity and divinity: life-in-death. The many different interpretations of the text’s symbols, which go far beyond just the leopard, show the diversity and depth of Hemingway’s writing.
Although the critical reception of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was mainly positive, some critics have noted the work’s sexist and anti-woman rhetoric. While Helen is a symbol of wealth, she is also a symbol of the poisonous or suffocating influence Hemingway believed women had on men’s lives. Evans notes that many of Hemingway’s works present women as obstacles to masculine self-actualization. Critic Lyall Bush bluntly refers to Helen’s characterization as “old-fashioned misogyny,” but also argues that Harry’s inner monologues grapple with gender and masculinity in a more nuanced fashion than simple sexism. Bush suggests that Harry’s oscillation between misogyny and self-awareness was taken directly from Hemingway’s own mind. In Hemingway’s autobiography, Green Hills of Africa, he states that “politics, women, drink, money, and ambition” are all things that have negative impacts on the writer, a sentiment that Harry seems to share. While Harry does exhibit enough self-awareness to know that Helen is not entirely to blame for the decline of his writing career, she undoubtedly persists as a symbol of death and rot. That these negative qualities are associated to some degree with her gender is a point of contention for some critics.
