essay on the short happy life of francis macomber

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A Summary and Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ is a popular Ernest Hemingway story with a decidedly atypical un-Hemingwayesque protagonist. First published in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1936, ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ is about a married American couple on safari in Africa with their English guide. The husband has a failure of nerve when faced with a lion during one of their hunts, and his wife loses respect for him.

Hemingway’s story doesn’t have the quintessential Hemingway hero at the centre: Francis Macomber is a weaker, more introspective figure than many of Hemingway’s male protagonists. Before we dig down into an analysis of the story, here’s a reminder of the plot, which includes a lengthy flashback.

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’: plot summary

The story is set in Africa, where a married couple, Francis and Margaret (Margot) Macomber, are on safari, accompanied by Robert Wilson, an English professional hunter acting as their guide. The couple are preparing for lunch, and discuss their morning’s hunting with Wilson. It emerges that during the morning’s hunt, Francis panicked when he was stalking a lion and ran away. His wife mocks him for his cowardice.

In the afternoon, Francis goes hunting again, with Wilson accompanying him. He shoots and kills an impala, but it’s clear that he’s still ashamed of running from the lion earlier. That night, he lies in bed and thinks back to the lion hunt, with a substantial portion of the story being devoted to a long flashback in which he remembers the event in detail.

We learn that hearing the lion roar the night before had made Francis nervous even before they set off on the morning’s hunt, and he had admitted as much over breakfast, questioning Wilson about how best to kill a lion. When they had spotted a lion while driving around in their car, they had stopped and approached it. Francis had shot the animal, which had run away, but he was reluctant to kill it. When they approached the lion, with Wilson offering to shoot it, the lion charged them and Francis had run away, leaving Wilson to kill the lion.

On their way back to the car, Margot had kissed Wilson, and Francis believes he has lost his wife’s respect and admiration. However, we are led to believe that Margot is too beautiful for Francis to give her up, and Francis is too rich for Margot to leave him. They have been married for eleven years and their marriage has endured other tests before this.

We return to Francis Macomber lying awake, the flashback of the previous morning’s events over. He falls asleep, but has a nightmare about the lion, and then realises his wife is not asleep beside him. She returns a couple of hours later, having been with Wilson. At breakfast the next morning, Wilson can tell that Francis knows what has happened, but he doesn’t show any remorse.

After breakfast, the three of them go out to hunt buffalo. Francis is so filled with rage towards Wilson that he forgets all of his fear, charging after the buffalo and killing the biggest one that crosses their path. He also kills another which Wilson has brought down but only wounded. Buoyed by his success, Francis starts to behave differently, and Margot is unnerved by this.

They pursue the other buffalo that got away, wounded. As the buffalo charges towards Francis, he prepares to shoot it, but Margot shoots him in the head, killing him. There is some ambiguity surrounding whether she was trying to save her husband (she was aiming for the charging buffalo attacking her husband, but hit him instead) or whether, as Wilson believes, she deliberately aimed her shot at Francis all along.

Wilson comforts the sobbing Margot, reassuring her that people will chalk up her husband’s death to an accident, though he tells her that he believes she meant to kill him.

‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’: analysis

Despite the clearness of his prose, many critics have argued that Hemingway ends ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ on an ambiguous note, leaving us to make up our own minds about whether Margot deliberately shot her husband or if she was genuinely trying to save him from a charging bull buffalo.

There is a third option, of course, which is that she was consciously aiming for the buffalo but a part of her subconscious wanted to kill Francis, so she could be rid of him, inherit his fortune, and have relationships with men like Wilson, free from guilt or secrecy.

Of course, one objection to the argument that Margot deliberately shoots at her husband with the intention of ridding him from her life is the fact that, if she wanted him dead, she could simply have stood by and let the buffalo do the honours for her. It is, after all, charging straight for him.

Weighed against this argument is the observation that Francis has recently proved his mettle and, as it were, recovered his manhood since the incident of cowardice involving the lion. If he defends himself against the buffalo and survives, Margot is stuck with him. We might argue that she saw her chance to kill him ‘innocently’ and took it.

Of course, in killing her husband, he is also robbed of the chance of knowing whether he could ‘take’ the buffalo: whether he, or it, would have emerged victorious from their showdown.

Certainly, her character is not exactly a sympathetic one in the rest of the story. She loses her respect for her husband when he runs from the lion, and supposedly goes to bed with another man as a result of this. There’s an implication that she’s only (or at least largely) with her husband at all because of his money.

And she seems confused and worried by his sudden regaining of his courage and manhood at the end of the story. How we should ‘read’ Margot has perplexed and divided critics ever since ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ was first published.

If she does deliberately choose to kill her husband, what is Margot’s motivation? It’s clear that she has lost respect for him following his behaviour in front of the lion, but at the end of the story he appears to have regained his courage. Does she feel threatened by this? Perhaps, after bedding Wilson, she cannot bear to think of her husband as anything but a coward. She actually wants him to be like that, because she can feel superior to him: indeed, more ‘manly’ than he is.

Alternatively, it’s possible that she feared, not being stuck with Francis, but the opposite: that now he has recovered his courage, he will not be content to remain with her and will seek to divorce her and take his wealth elsewhere.

She does not seem to be overly enamoured of Wilson, either, criticising his obsession with blowing the heads off things and turning her sarcasm on him. She is prepared to sleep with him, but she seems to be as critical of him as she is of her husband. In many ways, Hemingway’s story presents two very different and contrasting versions of manhood, but implies that both are insufficient in themselves. Wilson is the man of action but lacks heart, while Francis lacks the hardened resolve which she detects in their English guide.

Courage and cowardice are central, mutually complementary themes in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’. The story is framed by Francis’ initial failure of nerve, although Hemingway chooses to begin the story in the aftermath of this event, and then reveal what happened to us only later, during a flashback.

This means that we cannot judge what happened ourselves, at least initially, and first have to get to know the personalities of Francis and Margot as the dynamic of their marriage is slowly revealed to us.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Analysis of Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 14, 2021

In the story by Ernest Hemingway, the setting is Africa, where Margot and Francis Macomber have hired the English guide Robert Wilson to take them on a big-game hunt. The Macomber marriage is on shaky ground, but “Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him.” The narrative begins at lunch, after Francis has shown himself to be a coward by running from a wounded lion. The narrative flashes back through Francis’s memory of the lion hunt and even into the lion’s sensibility, showing the hunt from the lion’s point of view.

The next scene occurs early the following morning, when Francis encounters Margot returning to their tent after a presumably sexual interlude with Wilson, who carries a double cot for just such occasions. The next morning all three characters go out in a car to hunt buffalo. Macomber bags his buffalo and begins to feel good about himself, as his cheerful, confident behavior clearly indicates. Wilson sees the change in him. Margot is discomfitted by the whole episode. When a wounded bull charges them, Macomber stands his ground to shoot him but is killed by his wife when she shoots at the buffalo “with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber.” Wilson seems to accuse Margot of murdering her husband, asking, “Why didn’t you poison him? That’s what they do in England.” But he also assures her that he and the gun bearers will testify that it was an accident.

Ernest Hemingway/Life

A central theme is the importance of courage. Wilson quotes Shakespeare: “A man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will; he that dies this year is quit for the next.” The implication of these lines fits into the Hemingway code: Since a man has only one chance to face death, he should do so with dignity and grace. Hemingway’s title indicates that without courage a man is less than a man. In that “short” period preceding Macomber’s death, he has behaved courageously and become a man. Therefore, he is “happy.” Wilson, however, categorizes Francis as a soft, great American boy-man. Wilson’s manly character, in contrast to his description of Macomber’s, is outwardly that of a man who fearlessly and competently kills the game he pursues. Yet he is more predator than gallant hunter, cuckolding Francis and then describing his conquest, Margot, as hard, cruel, and dominating. In Macomber and Wilson, Hemingway embodies two definitions of male behavior.

Only one character, however, represents female behavior. Did Margot Macomber shoot her husband on purpose because she feared losing him, given his newfound self-assurance, or was she trying to save his life, accidentally hitting him as she shot at the charging buffalo? Controversy has raged since the story was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in September 1936, not unaided by the author himself, who wrote: “No, I don’t know whether she shot him on purpose any more than you do.” “Macomber” is a highly elusive text, open to endless reinterpretations, the most recent informed by both a heightened environmentalism, which views big-game hunting in an unfavorable light, and by feminist criticism, which is mindful of sexist standards in the evaluation of women’s behavior.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baym, Nina. “Actually, I Felt Sorry for the Lion.” In New Critical Approaches to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, edited by Jackson J. Benson, 112–120. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990.

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Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

By ernest hemingway, short stories of ernest hemingway summary and analysis of "the short happy life of francis macomber".

Hemingway introduces the three principal characters, Francis Macomber , his wife Margot, and their safari guide Richard Wilson, over cocktails in the afternoon on the African plain following a morning of hunting. Macomber and his wife are wealthy Americans hoping to revitalize their sometimes-foundering marriage with a romantic African safari and Wilson is a jaded Englishman who runs safaris for wealthy tourists for a living. As the three drink gimlets, they dance around the topic of Macomber’s display of cowardice earlier that day as he ran away from a wounded lion and left Wilson to shoot it.

As Macomber becomes apologetic toward Wilson, Margot loses her composure and runs off to cry out of shame on her husband’s behalf. Macomber expresses his embarrassment to Wilson once more and asks Wilson not to mention his cowardice to mutual acquaintances. This is too much for Wilson, who insults Macomber in an attempt to estrange himself from husband and wife and set up an atmosphere of professional coolness for the remainder of the safari. Macomber is too friendly, however, and Wilson ends up both liking and pitying him.

Margot returns to the table and begins a campaign of “bitchery” against her husband, referring obliquely and ironically to the topics of fear, lions, and hunting both to needle Macomber and impress Wilson. Wilson’s sympathy for Macomber deepens.

In the late afternoon, Macomber and Wilson go off together and shoot impala while Margot stays behind in camp looking, as Wilson puts it, like an English rose (though she is American). Macomber successfully shoots an impala.

That night after dinner, Macomber lies in his bunk and meditates on his loss of confidence and the cowardice that replaced his self-assurance. He relives the incident beginning with his attempt at sleep 24 hours earlier, which was when he first heard the roaring of the lion and became afraid of it. The day of the incident, he discussed shooting the lion with Wilson over breakfast, then the three drove off in a car to find it. Once it appeared, Wilson encouraged Macomber to get out and shoot it, which he did, alone, after hesitating and missing a good shot. Gut-shot, the lion slunk into the bush and Wilson announced they were going in after it to finish it off. Macomber, terrified but unable to appear so, accompanied Wilson into the bush and promptly ran when the wounded lion leaped at him. Wilson shot it and Margot witnessed the whole incident from the car. When the men return to the car, Margot kisses Wilson.

Macomber also meditates on the fact that his marriage had been on the rocks before but that he was sure his wife would not leave him because he was too rich. He was equally sure he would never leave her because she was too beautiful. He then falls asleep, waking to find his wife gone. After two hours, Margot returns to the tent and it becomes clear that she has slept with Wilson. She refuses to discuss the matter with Macomber.

The next morning, the atmosphere is strained. Wilson absolves himself of blame by mentally rubbishing Macomber and explaining to the reader that he sleeps with many of the wives of his clients, who feel that they are not getting their money’s worth unless they share his cot at some point during the expedition. Presently, husband, wife, and guide start off in the car in search of buffalo. They find three and chase them in their car. Macomber and Wilson fire a volley of shots and bring down all three. The chase and the shootings are fast-paced and exciting, and leave Macomber with a sense of elation and a new confidence, which Wilson likens to a “coming of age.” Margot is clearly uneasy about this development, which seems to foreshadow a power shift in her relationship with her husband.

One of the gun-bearers then comes limping up to the car to announce that the first buffalo Macomber shot was not killed but wounded, and has crawled off into the brush. The car is driven back to the shooting site, and Macomber and Wilson walk into the brush in search of the buffalo, which charges Macomber. Macomber stands his ground in front of the charging animal and both he and Wilson shoot it. As it is about to hit Macomber, Margot fires from the car, shooting Macomber in the back of the head and killing him.

Wilson sarcastically assures Margot that she will not be convicted of her husband’s murder, though he says Macomber “would have left you too.” Margot is hysterical, and it is left unclear whether she hit her husband accidentally or is a cold-blooded murderess.

Hemingway’s themes in this story are masculinity and its foil, cowardice, and the “coming of age” that is possible through exposure to nature and by overcoming the challenges of the great outdoors. Francis Macomber is described as a handsome man who is “good at court games” and “had a number of big-game fishing records,” and whose safari clothes are, significantly, “new.” He is a typical international jet setter who lives in a suburban or perhaps big-city setting and has had no real exposure to a raw, unadulterated natural environment, though he is considered athletic. As such, Hemingway portrays him as weak, subservient to his wife, cowardly and frustrated. Once he conquers his fears and guns down three buffalo, he becomes empowered, emboldened, and elated. By conquering nature, he has become a man. As Robert Wilson puts it, “It had taken a strange chance of hunting, a sudden precipitation into action without worrying beforehand, to bring this about with Macomber…Fear gone like an operation. Something else grew in its place. Main thing a man had. Made him into a man. Women knew it too. No bloody fear.”

Hemingway was a great believer in the power of nature to improve one’s quality of life. He was a lifelong outdoorsman; he went hunting, fishing, camping, and boating in places as diverse as Europe, the Caribbean, the United States, and Africa. In fact, he wrote this short story following a 10-week safari in East Africa. This story summarizes the importance Hemingway placed on outdoor activities, especially for men. The character of Macomber comes into his own masculinity through a few seconds of shooting buffalo; the activity of hunting not only provides entertainment, excitement, and physical fitness, but it completely transforms his character and revolutionizes his relationships with others.

Hemingway’s masculine ideal in this story seems to be Wilson, the “white hunter” who lives, works, shoots, and kills in the great outdoors, and whose stock-in-trade is ruggedness and physical courage. Margot and the reader are invited to compare Macomber to Wilson, and certainly, Wilson comes out on top in that comparison. However, at the end of the story Wilson breaks the code he purports to live by as he hunts down buffalo in a car, a certainly unsportsmanlike, possibly cowardly, and indisputably illegal act. Wilson may be a paragon of manly virtues after the Hemingway school of masculinity, but he is by no means perfect.

Macomber emphasizes masculinity not only by contrast to cowardice but also to femininity, specifically through the character of Margot, who is central to the story’s plot. Hemingway’s treatment of women in his fiction has long been, and continues to be, the subject of debate among critics. The accepted wisdom is that Hemingway was a chauvinist and possibly a misogynist; women in his stories are obstacles to their male counterparts rather than positive contributors to the action. Many critics have challenged this view, arguing that Hemingway’s portrayal of women is more nuanced and his general attitude more complex than the traditional view suggests.

There is little debate, however, that Margot Macomber is one of Hemingway’s “bitch goddess” characters; she is grasping, cruel, contemptible, unfaithful, opportunistic, and possibly murderous. In general, Hemingway treats Margot as a necessary evil in this story, as an inconvenient but essential component of the existence of his male characters. Wilson calls women “a nuisance” on safari, and indeed, Margot’s only function in this story is to drive Wilson and Macomber apart in spite of their often-mutual desire to be friendly or at least cordial with each other. In addition, Wilson makes a number of sweeping and unflattering generalizations about American women of the jet set using Margot as a case study. In spite of his attraction to her, he calls her “enameled in that American female cruelty” and refers to her sarcasm at Macomber’s expense after the lion incident “damn terrorism.” Margot is portrayed as a thorough harpy; her only redeeming quality appears to be her beauty, as Wilson recognizes the morning after he sleeps with her. As for Macomber, he considers Margot’s beauty to be the only thing that gives her value; it is the only reason he married her and the only reason he will never leave her. He recognizes that “His wife had been a great beauty and she was still a great beauty in Africa, but she was not a great enough beauty any more at home to be able to leave him and better herself and she knew it and he knew it.” Margot’s beauty is her only stock-in-trade.

The lingering question of the story, of course, is whether Margot felt threatened enough by Macomber’s emancipation to murder him at the end, or whether she was merely trying to kill the buffalo. Scholars have come down on both sides of the question. The traditional reading of the story teaches that Margot is a thoroughly grasping and cruel character who shoots to kill, but more revisionist interpretations point out that, when she pulls the trigger, it is unnecessary for her to be shooting to kill her husband because the buffalo will run him down in a few seconds anyway. In addition, the accusations of murder that Wilson levels at her may be motivated by a desire to blackmail her into silence about the fact that he hunted the buffalo from a car, an illegal practice. According to many scholars, Hemingway himself used to hint that Macomber’s death was murder.

Another lingering question among Hemingway scholars is whether Macomber and Margot are modeled on F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda. Fitzgerald was a friend-turned-bitter-rival of Hemingway’s and some critics argue that Hemingway created Macomber as an incarnation of all the qualities Hemingway most disliked in his nemesis. Hemingway certainly mentioned Fitzgerald by name in some of his other stories. Proponents of this theory point to the fact that Hemingway chose to name Macomber “Francis,” which was also Fitzgerald’s first name. However, critics point out that this choice was more likely a reference to Francis Feeble, a character in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV who served as the original speaker of the quotation Wilson offers about death toward the end of the story.

The narration of this story is in the third person with an omniscient narrator; Hemingway tells the story from the points of view of Macomber, Wilson, Margot and the lion from which Macomber flees. As the plot is driven by interpersonal relationships, this technique is effective at revealing each character’s motivations and the reasons for their behavior. The points of view most often adopted by the narrator are Macomber’s and Wilson’s, a trend that is consistent with Hemingway’s marginalization of Margot.

Two literary techniques are in play throughout the story that enliven the action and embellish Hemingway’s otherwise minimal descriptive passages. The first is onomatopoeia, and is best exemplified by “whunk,” the noise Macomber’s bullet makes as it hits the lion (p. 22, 33), and “carawong,” the noise Wilson’s high-velocity “big gun” makes as it fires at game (p. 26, 34). Hemingway’s usage of these terms helps the reader imagine the noises and brutality of the hunt.

The second technique Hemingway employs is simile and metaphor. The most notable example occurs in Wilson’s thoughts when Macomber suggests they leave the wounded lion: “Robert Wilson, whose entire occupation had been with the lion and the problem he presented, and who had not been thinking about Macomber except to note that he was rather windy, suddenly felt as though he had opened the wrong door in a hotel and seen something shameful” (p. 24). This simile demonstrates Wilson’s shock at hearing Macomber voice such cowardly sentiments; Macomber would rather leave the lion to suffer or risk someone else running into the lion and possibly being killed than face up to hunting it down and finishing what he started.

One of the most prominent metaphors in the story is soon after this passage and describes the appearance of the gun-bearers who have to accompany Macomber and Wilson into the brush to search for the wounded lion: “[Wilson] spoke in Swahili to the two gun-bearers who looked the picture of gloom” (p. 25).

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” is a story about one man’s “coming of age” with the help of the African flatlands, a rifle, and a friendship with another man, and about how his emancipation was possibly forestalled by a selfish wife.

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Who dreams of becoming a bullfighter?

The protagonist, a young country boy named Paco, has dreams of becoming a bullfighter

In another country

Nick is alone in a foreign country and feels isolated. He states that people on the street hate officers and yell at him as he walks past. The effect of this harassment is partially offset by Nick’s association with three other officers and the...

Identify parallelism in the short story "In Another Country" by citing textual evidence. How does the use of parallelism affect the story

Stylistically, the story makes use of parallelism and repetition to emphasize the narration. For example, in the first paragraph, which sets the tone of the story using descriptions of the landscape and fauna of Milan, Hemingway states, “It was...

Study Guide for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway study guide contains a biography of Ernest Hemingway, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Summary
• Character List

Essays for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Ernest Hemingway's short stories.

• Contrasting American and European Responses to WWI in In Another Country
• Death and Art in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
• Simply Powerful: Hemingway's Technique in Writing Dialogue
• Hemingway and Woolf: Different Faces of Modernism
• Life is Meaningless: Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"

Lesson Plan for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

• Introduction

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber Introduction

Critics seem to agree that "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is one of Ernest Hemingway 's best short stories. That's nothing to sniff at for an author who wrote a lot of really good shorts. This story has even been called "perfect." Now we're talking.

What exactly is so perfect about it? Frankly, it has just about everything you could want in a good page-turner: psychological drama, interpersonal scandals, and, of course, guns. But in addition to the theatrics, it is also an excellent demonstration of Hemingway's famously sparse prose style. The narrator gives us the details, nothing more, but packed in those details is all the psychological nuance of a session with Freud. Oh, and just so you know, "The Short Happy Life" was one of Hemingway's favorites.

"The Short Happy Life" was published in the September 1936 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine, along with " The Snows of Kilimanjaro ," another one of Hem's best. (FYI: those in the know refer to him as "Hem" or "Papa" – just choose your favorite.) Hemingway himself referred to "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" as his African stories because, well, they take place in Africa. But it's also part of a massive body of work that helped to earn Hemingway the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Over the years, "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" has been adapted to both radio and film, with a fair degree of popular success. At the time, having stories dramatized over the radio was a great way to reach a mass audience that didn't yet have televisions. "The Short Happy Life" was broadcast from NBC in Hollywood in 1948, and had an impressive one million listeners. Eventually, the story also became a movie, with a much more John Grisham title, The Macomber Affair .

It's also worth noting that many of Hemingway's novels and stories are based on people and experiences from his own life, and "The Short Happy Life" is no exception. In addition to the fact that Hemingway went on his own safari in the thirties, it's also possible the characters are based on friends of his – author F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda . The pair had a notoriously stormy marriage, and Margot has some eerie similarities to Zelda. Though we can't prove that the Scotts were Hem's inspiration, the parallels can't be denied.

Frankly, though, Hem did not have to go far to find an example of a disastrous marriage. He was smack dab in the middle of one, himself, with a woman named Pauline. Whatever the case, it's clear that marriage and all its drama (with which Hem was utterly familiar) are at the heart of "The Short Happy Life." Get ready for some serious spats on this safari, readers. This is not a tale of marital bliss.

What is The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber About and Why Should I Care?

Ever had a grand plan that simply didn't work out? Totally disappointing, right? Well there might just be a chance to reclaim your dignity. We're not suggesting that hunting big animals will save your rep. No, we're merely pointing out that facing your fears doesn't hurt quite as much as you might suspect. Let us explain.

Ernest Hemingway , our author here, was a really macho guy. Impressing other people by accomplishing daring and physical feats mattered a lot to him, and it matters a lot to title character Francis Macomber, too. Unfortunately, Macomber doesn't really have a great support network. His wife is hardly steadfast, and failing to kill that lion gives his lady an opportunity to jump all over him, in a bad way. It doesn't help that Wilson, paragon of manliness is watching it all go down.

Still, that does not stop Macomber. Does he let a hypercritical, cheating wife, a contemptuous mentor, and scornful locals get him down? Nope. He keeps right on going (after moping for a bit), and gets back out on the horse, or, we should say, the hunt.

Hemingway loves men who are working against the odds. "Underdog" might be too strong a word here, but we think you get our point. In Hemingway's world, men must always prove themselves. In Macomber, Hem gives us a model of persistence. He may have mucked it all up on his first attempt at the hunt, but he makes up for it the next day.

So the moral is if you can't shoot a lion, then go shoot a buffalo. In other words, if one challenge proves to be too much, choose another one (we're not about to recommend that you go big game hunting in Africa just to raise your rep). There will always be another challenge to bump up against, and you'll always have another shot at proving yourself. Just remember that in the end, Macomber finds happiness against the odds because he proves his worth to himself.

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Maccomber by Ernest Hemingway

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

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Analysis: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”

The title foreshadows the story’s conclusion, making it clear that Francis Macomber will die. However, suspense and character development arise from questions of why his life is both short and happy. Initially, Macomber lacks the courage to make his life happier, just as he lacks the courage to confront the lion.

Despite the great wealth that permits him to fund his safaris, Macomber is initially depicted as emasculated, timid, and inadequate. His money can hire a huntsman and staff to manage his safari, but it cannot provide courage, his wife's respect, or security in his manhood. His wife, Margot, controls and belittles him. She tells Wilson that her husband’s “face is never red” (117); as implied in the subtext, unlike Wilson, Macomber obeys his wife's orders and wears his hat to keep the sun off his face. He is not sunburned because he is not rugged or adventurous, but sheltered, compliant, and cautious.

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

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• Academia - The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber: Why Margot Ended It

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber , short story by Ernest Hemingway , first published in Cosmopolitan in 1936, collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories (1938). Set on an African safari, the story contains some of the author’s recurrent themes—“grace under pressure” and adherence to a manly code of behaviour. It is also known for its ambiguous depiction of emotions and motivations.

The character Francis Macomber, a wealthy American, and his wife, Margot, are on safari with their English guide, Robert Wilson . Macomber wounds a lion and runs away in fear. The guide is horrified at his bad sportsmanship; his wife ridicules him for his cowardice. Margot seduces Wilson, taking care that Macomber is not unaware of her infidelity and contempt . The next day Macomber redeems himself by killing a buffalo cleanly and bravely. He achieves a feeling of happiness he has never known before; standing his ground, unafraid, he faces another buffalo, a charging, badly wounded bull. From the car where she has been watching, Margot takes aim and shoots at the charging buffalo, apparently to save her husband’s life. Her shot strikes her husband, killing him at his moment of triumph.

• The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber

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In one of his most acclaimed short stories, Hemingway wrestles with his usual conceptual suspects: wounded heroes, false idols, deception within relationships, inventing new reasons to drink, deciphering between paranoia and perception, hunting, and the desire to hurt the people you love (and who love you).

Set in Africa, the title character, his wife, a safari guide, and his aides are big game hunting when Macomber shows a bit of fear and can’t bring himself to kill a lion. The remainder of the story displays the psychological processes Macomber uses to cope with the event, and how the other characters impact the “recovery” of his manhood.

Gregory Peck starred in the story’s 1947 translation to film, “The Macomber Affair.”

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The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

Ernest hemingway.

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Masculinity, Dominance, and Courage

A hotly-pursued African lion in “The Short Life of Francis Macomber,” one of Hemingway’s most famous and controversial works, roars “in a deep-chested moaning, suddenly guttural,” unsettling his would-be hunter, Francis Macomber . Macomber’s subsequent, panicked flight from the animal causes his hunting party—which includes his bitter wife Margot and leader Robert Wilson —to deem him a coward. Only upon later successfully standing his ground against a charging buffalo is Macomber able to reassert his…

Race, Violence, and Empire

Written in 1936, a time when much of the African continent remained under European colonial rule, the specters of capitalism and empire move quietly through “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” The native Africans assisting the safari excursions remain nameless, personality-less characters, subject to orders and punishments from white game hunters. Though only briefly mentioned—for the narrative focuses mainly on the love triangle implicating its three white main characters—the maltreatment of the Swahili guides …

Guilt and Morality

Different sorts of moral codes conflict and create tension in “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” specifically visible in the character of Wilson . Though Wilson emphasizes the importance of limiting the hunted animals’ suffering, this firm esteem for the natural world counters his own lack of respect for other human beings within the world of the hunt—and for the social and legal regulations that organize human life. Wilson’s ambiguous and often outright contradictory…

Men and Nature

Equipped with potent technology—guns, cars , and the like—the hunters in this story are capable of exercising control over nature. Yet Wilson , Francis Macomber , and the Swahili guides regard the natural world with awe and veneration. They seem to recognize that despite their own forceful, dangerous weapons, the beasts they target are similarly powerful and dangerous, and thus are worthy of respect. Furthermore, since Hemingway highlights the perspectives of both the male hunters…

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