Product Description

The famous "Nick Adams" stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59850 in Books
• Published on: 1981-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780684169408
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Ernest Hemingway did more to change the style of English prose than any other writer of his time. Publication of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms immediately established Hemingway as one of the greatest literary lights of the twentieth century. As part of the expatriate community in 1920s Paris, the former journalist and World War I ambulance driver began a career that led to international fame. Hemingway was an aficionado of bullfighting and big-game hunting, and his main protagonists were always men and women of courage and conviction who suffered unseen scars, both physical and emotional.  He covered the Spanish Civil War, portraying it in the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he also covered World War II.  His classic novella The Old Man and the Sea won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He died in 1961.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Preface

"Of the place where he had been a boy he had written well enough. As well as he could then." So thought a dying writer in an early version of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The writer of course was Hemingway. The place was the Michigan of his boyhood summers, where he remembered himself as Nick Adams. As well as be could write then was very well indeed.

Until now, however, the stories involving Nick have always appeared so many to a book, in jumbled sequence. As a result the coherence of his adventures has been obscured, and their impact fragmented. In Men Without Women, Hemingway's second collection of stories, Nick appears first as a soldier in Italy, next as an adolescent in Summit, Illinois, then in turn as a younger boy in Michigan, a married man in Austria, and a soldier back in Italy. Or consider the trouble with "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the best-known Hemingway stories. Placed where it was -- at the end of In Our Time, the first collection -- it puzzled a good many readers. Put where it goes chronologically, following the stories of World War I, its submerged tensions -- the impression that Nick is exorcising some nameless anxiety -- become perfectly understandable. But "A Way You'll Never Be," which precedes "Big Two-Hearted River" in time and explains it, was published eight years and several books after it.

Arranged in chronological sequence, the events of Nick's life make up a meaningful narrative in which a memorable character grows from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's own life. In this arrangement Nick Adams, who for a long time was not widely recognized as a consistent character at all, emerges clearly as the first in a long line of Hemingway's fictional selves. Later versions, from Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry to Richard Cantwell and Thomas Hudson, were all to have behind them part of Nick's history and, correspondingly, part of Hemingway's.

As is true for many writers of fiction, the relationship between Hemingway's work and the events of his own life is an immediate and intricate one. In some stories he appears to report details of actual experience as faithfully as he might have entered them in a diary. In others the play of his imagination has transformed experience into a new and different reality. Exploring the connections between actuality and fiction in Hemingway can be an absorbing activity, and readers who wish to pursue it are referred to the biographical studies listed at the end of this preface. But Hemingway naturally intended his stories to be understood and enjoyed without regard for such considerations -- as they have been for a long time.

The first Nick Adams fiction appeared almost a half-century ago, the last in 1933, and over the years a great deal has been written about it. Among the unpublished manuscripts Hemingway left behind him, however, eight new contributions to the over-all narrative were discovered. Presented here for the first time, inserted in the places in time where the events fall, they are varied in length and apparent purpose. Three accounts -- of how the Indians left the country of Nick's boyhood, of his first sight of the Mississippi, and of what happened just before and after his wedding -- are quite brief. If the author had larger plans for any of them, such are unknown; they might be read simply as sketches in an artist's notebook. In two other cases his plans are self-evident, for here we have the beginnings of works that were never completed. Nick on board the Chicago, bound for France during World War I, was the start of a novel called Along with Youth that was abandoned long ago. Similarly, though much later, the plot of "The Last Good Country" was left in mid-air, and many pages would have been required to resolve it. Two other pieces are known to have originated in Nick stories already published. "Three Shots" tells how the young boy became frightened while on a camping trip. It once preceded the story called "Indian Camp." And Nick's "stream of consciousness" reflections on his writing career once (anachronistically) concluded "Big Two-Hearted River." Of these new works only "Summer People," very likely the first fiction Hemingway wrote about Nick Adams, can be regarded as a full-length, completed story.

To distinguish them from previously published works, all the new materials in this book have been printed in a special "oblique" type. If the decision to publish them at all is questioned, justification is available. For one thing, the plan for rearranging the Nick Adams stories coherently benefits from material that fills substantial gaps in the narrative. Further, all this new fiction relates in one way or another to events in the author's life, in which his readers continue to be interested. Last and most important is the fact that these pieces throw new light on the work and personality of one of our foremost writers and genuinely increase our understanding of him. The typography suggests an oblique introduction, but a warm reception is expected.

-- PHILIP YOUNG

Preface copyright © 1972 by Charles Scribner's Sons

From AudioFile
While many readers have speculated that the character of Nick Adams is a stand-in for Ernest Hemingway, the author firmly maintained that his character was fictional. In these seminal stories, the author takes his character full circle from childhood to parenthood. Stacy Keach gives Adams the soft-spoken voice of an innocent, a tone that remains a constant even as the character encounters the realities of living, including hit men and the horrors of war. Keach expertly illuminates the way Hemingways simple prose expresses something deeper. In stories like Big Two-Headed River, Keachs narration reveals the hidden complexity of the authors style. Keachs voice often carries a nostalgic tone that makes the stories feel personal. These stories are familiar to many, but Keachs fresh reading is superb. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

Deep and Beautiful
To me, this book is so eloquent I am reluctant to review it because it will be impossible to do it justice.

It is a collection of short stories from earlier works of Hemingway. In each of them, a thoughtful reader can gain insight into Hemingway and him/herself.

The following is from "Indian Camp." In it, Nick is a very young boy, and, with his physician father, he has been present at a difficult childbirth and found the victim of a suicide. Dawn is approaching and he is in the canoe with his father rowing back across the lake.
Quote:
"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"
"Not very many, Nick."...
"Is dying hard, Daddy?"
"No, I think it's pretty easy Nick. It all depends."
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Unquote

Regardless of how you feel about Hemingway, this is a poignant look into the soul of the man, and ourselves. Hemingway's family was plagued by suicide, including that of his physician father, and, like all of us, Hemingway was once a young child coming to grips with the idea of mortality, in a world still fresh and fascinating and frightening.

Other stories deal with the joys of a life full-lived, an appreciation of the natural world around us, and our "quiet desperation," in love, life, and death.

"The Nick Adams Stories" is high on my "Top Ten List."

The novel Hemingway never wrote
Though Hemingway did not, strictly speaking, write this book, he did write every word in it: except of course for the preface. The stories about Nick Adams originally appeared in the Hemingway collections, In Our Time, Men Without Women, and Winner Take Nothing, all published before Papa was 40. Here they have been assembled in "chronological" order, i.e. in an order based upon Nick's apparent age in the stories, and have been "supplemented" with 8 pieces of Nick Adams material which Hemingway never published. The best of these "new" pieces is "Summer People," a moving and evocative story involving young lust. The most fascinating piece, for those interested in Hemingway the writer, as writer, and in his opinions on other writers, is the piece "On Writing." Perhaps the most provocative "might have been" is the unfinished novella, "The Last Good Country," in which Nick runs away from home to avoid arrest by game wardens, and is accompanied by his younger sister, "Littless." This assemblage does not, to be sure, create a Nick Adams novel, but it does allow the stories to build and accumulate, and to create thereby, perhaps, the semblance of a life. And yes, of course I had to use the information in the preface to assemble this review. I'm not a Hemingway scholar, you know.

Perfect
This collection of short stories includes the most effective use of symbology that I have ever read. As such, it is important to find the deeper meaning behind Hemimgway's words when reading The Nick Adams Stories. For example, look for the psychological significance of the fish, river, backpack, and swamp in Big Two-Hearted River. The collection is highly emjoyable and is an excellent introduction to other works by Hemingway.