Ernest Hemingway wrote about many places - northern Michigan; France and Italy; Key West, Havana, and Bimini; East Africa - but no place had the effect on him, as a person or as a writer, that Spain did. In the second sentence of his last book, The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway claimed to like Spain better than any country except his own, and privately he said he loved Spain more than any place. To understand how and why Spain affected him so deeply is to explore the most profound mysteries of Hemingway's craft, both as stylist and as creator of narrative fiction.

The effect of place on writers is well known, especially the home place: William Faulkner's northern Mississippi or Thomas Wolfe's North Carolina highlands come readily to mind as examples. With Hemingway the case is quite different. He wrote very little about his hometown of Oak Park or nearby Chicago. Nick Adams, one of his most autobiographical characters, thinks in the story “The Killers” that he ought to get out of town. Hemingway himself did virtually the same and seldom returned.