Product Description

THIS COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND VIGNETTES MARKED ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S AMERICAN DEBUT AND MADE HIM FAMOUS

When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler," and introduces readers to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose -- enlivened by an car for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic that suggests, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and a clarity of heart.

Now recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, In Our Time provides a key to Hemingway's later works.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2621 in Books
• Published on: 1996-01-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Amazon.com
No writer has been more efficiently overshadowed by his imitators than Ernest Hemingway. From the moment he unleashed his stripped-down, declarative sentences on the world, he began breeding entire generations of miniature Hemingways, who latched on to his subtractive style without ever wondering what he'd removed, or why. And his tendency to lapse into self-parody during the latter half of his career didn't help matters. But In Our Time, which Hemingway published in 1925, reminds us of just how fresh and accomplished his writing could be--and gives at least an inkling of why Ezra Pound could call him the finest prose stylist in the world.

In his first commercially published book (following the small-press appearance of Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1924), Hemingway was still wearing his influences on his sleeve. The vignettes between each story smack of Gertrude Stein, whose minimalist punctuation and clodhopping rhythms he was happy to borrow. "My Old Man" sounds like Huck Finn on the Grand Tour: "Well, we went to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live I've ever seen in all my life." But in the "The Battler" or "Indian Camp" or "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway finds his own voice, shunning the least hint of rhetorical inflation and sticking to just the facts, ma'am. His reluctance to traffic in high-flown abstraction has often been chalked up to postwar disillusion--as though he were too much of a simpleton to make deliberate stylistic decisions. Still, nobody can read "Soldier's Home" without drawing a certain connection between the two. Returning home to Oklahoma, the hero finds that his tales of combat are now a bankrupt genre:

Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne forest and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

If we are to believe Michael Reynolds and Ann Douglas, this passage reflects the author's own dreary homecoming as a member of the lost generation. It's also a fine example of a surprisingly rare phenomenon, at least at this point in his career: Hemingway being funny. --James Marcus

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THIS COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND VIGNETTES MARKED ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S AMERICAN DEBUT AND MADE HIM FAMOUS When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler," and introduces readers to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose - enlivened by an car for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic that suggests, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and a clarity of heart. Now recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, In Our Time provides a key to Hemingway's later works.

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Customer Reviews

The Book that Horrified Hemingway's Old Man
The story goes, that when Ernest Hemingway's parents first received copies of In Our Time, they were horrified and furious. His old man sent the books back to the publisher. A year later, in a letter to his father, Hemingway explained to his father what it was he was attempting as a young writer: "You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful."

We know Hemingway more for his off-the-page exploits than those he published, but in these short pieces, peppered with very short (mostly one page) pieces, Hemingway first introduces his hard-boiled style to an American audience. An earlier, much shorter version of this book was published the year before in Paris. Hemingway expects something of his readers. Much remembered for his belief that a good writer can say much more by employing omission than by saying too much, he leaves the job of applying sentiment and emotion to the reader.

Hemingway at his best, the understated short story
Hemingway is the master of the understated short story. He takes simple themes and without use of superlatives, makes it real. This book is a collection of short stories where most feature a man name Nick, from his time as a young boy to manhood as it closes with two stories about him fishing. There is one story where no male name is given, so it may also be about Nick.
The most gripping story is "Soldier's Home", which features a character called Krebs. He is back in Kansas after serving in the European theater in World War I. Unlike many of his fellow Americans, he did not return until the middle of 1919, so he missed most of the ecstasy of the welcome-home parades. Krebs has difficulty coming back to what he left in Kansas. He has no interest in women, a job or anything that could lead to a bettering of his current condition. Living with his parents, they are growing disturbed at his listlessness, his mother sits down with him and wants to pray for his changing. While Krebs vows to change, it is not a heartfelt pronouncement, rather it is more of a "whatever" change in his attitude.
Given his experience, Hemingway knew war. But he also knew the difficulties of peace for men of war and a great deal about the simpler challenges of life. Much of that knowledge and experience is demonstrated in these stories.

The essence of Hemingway is here
It is not true that Hemingway would go on to create works better than some of the stories in this work. In some of these short pieces we have the essential Hemingway, the best that he has to give. In fact his whole picture of the world, the emphasis on 'grace under pressure' the devastating effect of war and violence, the presentation of a kind of code hero, above all the simplicity and beauty of the language are here.
This is the beginning of Hemingway but it is also the essence and the best.