The Torrents of Spring

This Hemingways second published work which wonderfully parodies the themes and styles of the 'great race' of writers of his generation. Set in northern Michigan in the mid-1920s, this book is about two men, World War I veteran Yogi Johnson and writer Scripps O'Neill, both of whom work at a pump factory. Both are searching for the perfect woman. The story begins with O'Neill returning home to find that his wife and small daughter have left him. O'Neill befriends a British waitress, Diana, at the beanery where she works and asks her to marry him immediately but he soon becomes disenchanted with her. Diana tries to impress her husband by reading books from the lists of The New York Times Book Reviews, but he soon leaves her for another waitress, Mandy, who enthralls him with literary anecdotes. O'Neill takes mescaline and hallucinates that he is President of Mexico. He appoints a third waitress, Ruby, as his vice president and plots to undo the losses of the Battle of Veracruz. Johnson, who becomes depressed after a Parisian prostitute leaves him for a British officer, 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. Ultimately, he falls in love with a native American woman who enters a restaurant clothed only in moccasins, the wife of one of the two Indians he befriends near the end of the story.