Yogi Johnson has a period during which he anguishes over the fact that he doesn't seem to desire any woman at all, even though spring is approaching, 'which turns a young man's fancy to love.' At last, he falls in love with an Indigenous American woman who enters a restaurant clothed only in moccasins, the wife of one of the two Indigenous Americans he befriends near the end of the story, in the penultimate chapter. But O'Neill soon leaves her (as she feared he would when she first met him) for another waitress, Mandy, who enthralls him with her store of literary (but possibly made up) anecdotes. The story begins with O'Neill returning home from the library to find that his wife and small daughter have left him, explaining that 'It takes a lot to mend the walls of fate.' O'Neill, desperate for companionship, befriends a British waitress, Diana, at the restaurant where she works and immediately asks her to marry him.ĭiana makes an attempt to impress her spouse by reading books from the lists of The New York Times Book Review, including many forgotten pot-boilers of the 1920s. Both are searching for the perfect woman, though they disagree over this ideal. Set in northern Michigan, The Torrents of Spring concerns two men who work at a pump factory: World War I veteran Yogi Johnson, and writer Scripps O'Neill. It is Hemingway's first long work and was written as a parody of Sherwood Anderson's Dark Laughter. Subtitled 'A Romantic Novel in Honor of the Passing of a Great Race', Hemingway used the work as a spoof of the world of writers.

The Torrents of Spring is a novella written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1926.

Sherwood anderson novel