In Our Time (book)
Encyclopedia
In Our Time is the first collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway
published by Boni & Liveright
in New York in 1925, after a smaller edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924. It contains several well-known Hemingway stories, including the Nick Adams
stories "Indian Camp
," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler
", and introduces readers to Hemingway's distinctive style. "On the Quai at Smyrna" was first published as the introduction to the 1930 edition.
The 1924 Parisian edition, in our time, consisted of 32 pages and was published in a small edition of 170 copies and contained only the vignette
s later used as interchapters for In Our Time, though some of these vignettes, like "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist," were treated as full short stories in the later collection.
The title comes from the English Book of Common Prayer
: "give us peace in our time, O Lord", suggested to Hemingway by Ezra Pound
. At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a significant development in prose fiction, for its spare language and oblique depiction of the psychological states of the characters portrayed.
and Hadley Richardson
moved from Illinois to Paris, following Sherwood Anderson
's advice that the city was inexpensive and a good place for a young writer to live. There Hemingway met Gertrude Stein
, Ezra Pound
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
and James Joyce
. He worked for the The Toronto Star as an international correspondent, and traveled around Europe reporting on the Greco-Turkish War and sporting events in Spain and Germany. He continued to write fiction and a few pieces of juvenilia
he brought to Paris such as "Up in Michigan", a story Gertrude Stein judged unfit for publication.
All of his writing was lost in 1922 when a suitcase packed by Hadley containing all his manuscripts and their duplicates was stolen from the Gare de Lyons
and never recovered. Hemingway was furious and distraught, but Ezra Pound
told him he had only lost the time it would take to rewrite the pieces. Hemingway either took Pound's advice and rewrote the lost pieces, or he wrote new work; by the end of 1923 he had the 18 sketches that became in our time.
The piece became a work in progress, keeping the same title, and sections were published in 1923, 1924 and 1925. In April 1923 six vignettes, none over 200 words, appeared in the April edition of The Little Review
under the title "In Our Time". These were later published with 12 others in the Paris edition of in our time, and as "interchapters" in the 1925 American edition. Late in 1924 he had finished the stories that were published in the American edition of In Our Time, saying of his work, "I've worked like hell most of the time and think the stuff gets better."
. The book was first published in Paris in 1924 on hand-made paper in a 38-page volume with a print-run of 170. It included 18 vignettes written the year before, presented as untitled chapters. The pieces were meant to convey a sense of journalism or news, so Bird designed a distinctive dust-jacket showing a collage of newspaper articles.
The later American edition of In Our Time was to include a collection of short stories as well as the vignettes printed in the Parisian run. Most of the stories were written in 1924. Boni & Liveright
published the book in 1925, with a print-run of 1335 copies, costing $2 each. Sixteen of the vignettes from the earlier Parisian edition were kept as numbered interchapter sketches; two had been published in his first book "Three Stories and 10 poems"; two were from in our time; six had been published in literary magazines. Four had never been published before.
soldier's love affair with a Red Cross nurse, was based on Hemingway's affair with Agnes von Kurowsky
during his hospitalization in Milan
after an injury sustained at the Italian front during WWI. The other WWI pieces (Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 7) may have been based on stories told him by his friend Chink Dorman-Smith
. The piece about a robbery and murder in Kansas City (Chapter 9), was inspired by newspaper story Hemingway covered while a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star. Chapter 2, and 11 - 16 were written after his first trip to Spain and depict the world of bullfighting.
". In Our Time includes 14 short stories, almost all written in 1924, and many are considered some of Hemingway's best short fiction.
The volume began with two stories linked thematically, set in Michigan, introducing young Nick Adams
: "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife". "The End of Something" is a story about Nick as a teenager breaking up with a girl; the next story, "Three-Day Blow", has Nick and a friend Bill spending three days at a lake, drinking and talking. In "The Battler
", as he returns home from WWI, Nick meets a prize-fighter. This is followed by "A Very Short Story", a WWI love story set in Italy; "Soldier's Home" is set in Kansas; and "The Revolutionist" again is set in Italy. Three marriage stories follow: "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot", "Cat in the Rain" and "Out of Season". Nick reappears in "Cross Country Snow", set in Switzerland. "My Old Man" is set in Paris. The volume ends with the two-part story "The Big Two-Hearted River", set in Michigan and featuring Nick Adams. Newer editions of the volume begin with "On the Quai at Smyrna".
The first interchapter was written as a single paragraph and first published in The Little Review. Reflective of the style of the finished work, it is tightly compressed showing Hemingway's utilization of Pound's imagist
theories, and in its detachment, echoes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
. The small paragraph shows Hemingway, as Pound had done in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
, treating WWI with bitterness. Moreover, Hemingway took Pound's advice and used words sparingly—achieving the spareness of style for which he was to become famous.
Hemingway biographer James Mellow believes In Our Time to be Hemingway's most experimental book in that it transcends a mere collection of stories. He believes that in this, Hemingway's first published book, he established the primary themes to which he returned during his career as an author. The stories in the book establish themes such as initiation rites and early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life, and the importance of male comradeship. The in our time vignettes, or interchapters, concern war, bullfighting and crime—all topics Hemingway returned to in his later work. Mellow believes the invention of Nick Adams was "vital to Hemingway's career". From the first story, "Indian Camp", which introduces Adams as a young boy, the character is a doppelgänger
, a conduit through whom Hemingway expresses his own experiences. The second story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", considered by Mellow as one of Hemingway's major stories, is important because through Nick, Hemingway regales his childhood experiences with his parents.
"The Big-Two Hearted River", a two-part story, finishes the collection. It was designed and written to be the concluding and climatic piece of In Our Time. In describing the piece to Gertrude Stein
, Hemingway wrote he was "trying to do the country with Cézanne
." Nothing much happens in the story—nothing much is meant to happen. The surface details mask the deep inner turmoil Nick Adams feels after returning from the war; the sojourn on the river is to function as a place of tranquility and rehabilitation for him.
described the writing as "of the first destinction", enough to bring attention to the work.
In Our Time was praised by literary critics when it was published in 1925, and Mellow says of the book that it is one of Hemingway's masterpieces, although ironically his parents hated it and referred to it as "filth".
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
published by Boni & Liveright
Boni & Liveright
Boni & Liveright was a publishing house established in 1916 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice...
in New York in 1925, after a smaller edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924. It contains several well-known Hemingway stories, including the Nick Adams
Nick Adams (character)
Nick Adams is a fictional character, the protagonist of two dozen short stories by American author Ernest Hemingway, written in the 1920s and 30s...
stories "Indian Camp
Indian Camp
"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in the American edition of Hemingway's first volume of short stories In Our Time...
," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway published in his 1925 volume of short stories In Our Time.In the story a doctor hires a three Native Americans to clean up some logs on his property, and one of the workers casually asks him where he stole them from. The doctor...
," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler
The Battler
"The Battler" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. It was included in the collection In Our Time .In the story, Nick Adams is thrown from a train and finds temporary shelter at a campfire. There, he meets an ex-boxer named Ad Francis. Francis takes an immediate liking to Adams, who he...
", and introduces readers to Hemingway's distinctive style. "On the Quai at Smyrna" was first published as the introduction to the 1930 edition.
The 1924 Parisian edition, in our time, consisted of 32 pages and was published in a small edition of 170 copies and contained only the vignette
Vignette (literature)
In theatrical script writing, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or gives a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting and sometimes an object...
s later used as interchapters for In Our Time, though some of these vignettes, like "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist," were treated as full short stories in the later collection.
The title comes from the English Book of Common Prayer
Book of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...
: "give us peace in our time, O Lord", suggested to Hemingway by Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
. At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a significant development in prose fiction, for its spare language and oblique depiction of the psychological states of the characters portrayed.
Background
Soon after their marriage in September 1921, Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
and Hadley Richardson
Hadley Richardson
Elizabeth Hadley Richardson married writer Ernest Hemingway in 1921. She was born the youngest daughter to a St. Louis family. After Hadley fell out of a window as a child, her mother became overprotective and curtailed her activities from then on...
moved from Illinois to Paris, following Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson
Sherwood Anderson was an American novelist and short story writer. His most enduring work is the short story sequence Winesburg, Ohio. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, J. D. Salinger, and Amos Oz.-Early life:Anderson was born in Clyde, Ohio,...
's advice that the city was inexpensive and a good place for a young writer to live. There Hemingway met Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
, F. Scott Fitzgerald
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...
and James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...
. He worked for the The Toronto Star as an international correspondent, and traveled around Europe reporting on the Greco-Turkish War and sporting events in Spain and Germany. He continued to write fiction and a few pieces of juvenilia
Juvenilia
Juvenilia is a term applied to literary, musical or artistic works produced by an author during his or her youth. The term often has a retrospective sense. For example, written juvenilia, if published at all, usually appear some time after the author has become well-known for later works.The term...
he brought to Paris such as "Up in Michigan", a story Gertrude Stein judged unfit for publication.
All of his writing was lost in 1922 when a suitcase packed by Hadley containing all his manuscripts and their duplicates was stolen from the Gare de Lyons
Paris-Gare de Lyon
Paris Lyon is one of the six large railway termini in Paris, France. It is the northern terminus of the Paris–Marseille railway. It is named after the city of Lyon, a stop for many long-distance trains departing here, most en route to the south of France. In general the station's SNCF services run...
and never recovered. Hemingway was furious and distraught, but Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
told him he had only lost the time it would take to rewrite the pieces. Hemingway either took Pound's advice and rewrote the lost pieces, or he wrote new work; by the end of 1923 he had the 18 sketches that became in our time.
The piece became a work in progress, keeping the same title, and sections were published in 1923, 1924 and 1925. In April 1923 six vignettes, none over 200 words, appeared in the April edition of The Little Review
The Little Review
The Little Review, an American literary magazine founded by Margaret Anderson, published literary and art work from 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson created a magazine that featured a wide variety of transatlantic modernists and cultivated many early examples of...
under the title "In Our Time". These were later published with 12 others in the Paris edition of in our time, and as "interchapters" in the 1925 American edition. Late in 1924 he had finished the stories that were published in the American edition of In Our Time, saying of his work, "I've worked like hell most of the time and think the stuff gets better."
Publication history
The high-end printing company, Three Mountains Press, was founded in the early 1920s by Bill Bird, a journalist stationed in Paris. He hired Ezra Pound as his editor, who sought to "keep the series strictly modern". Their aim was to publish well-produced limited private editions by a handful of modern authors, including Pound himself and Joyce, in small print-runs. Hemingway, who was unpublished, gave Bird a manuscript of vignettes that he titled Blank, later titled in our time from the Book of Common PrayerBook of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...
. The book was first published in Paris in 1924 on hand-made paper in a 38-page volume with a print-run of 170. It included 18 vignettes written the year before, presented as untitled chapters. The pieces were meant to convey a sense of journalism or news, so Bird designed a distinctive dust-jacket showing a collage of newspaper articles.
The later American edition of In Our Time was to include a collection of short stories as well as the vignettes printed in the Parisian run. Most of the stories were written in 1924. Boni & Liveright
Boni & Liveright
Boni & Liveright was a publishing house established in 1916 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright which made a name by publishing work considered avant-garde and in so doing published work by many modernist authors. They attracted attention from the Society for Suppression of Vice...
published the book in 1925, with a print-run of 1335 copies, costing $2 each. Sixteen of the vignettes from the earlier Parisian edition were kept as numbered interchapter sketches; two had been published in his first book "Three Stories and 10 poems"; two were from in our time; six had been published in literary magazines. Four had never been published before.
in our time
The 18 vignettes written in 1923 were presented as numbered chapters. They were based on contemporary news items (Chapters 3, 6, 9, and 17), war experiences and bull-fighting. One seven paragraph vignette—published as Chapter 10—about a World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
soldier's love affair with a Red Cross nurse, was based on Hemingway's affair with Agnes von Kurowsky
Agnes von Kurowsky
Agnes von Kurowsky Stanfield , an American nurse, was reportedly the basis for the character of "Catherine Barkley" in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms....
during his hospitalization in Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
after an injury sustained at the Italian front during WWI. The other WWI pieces (Chapters 1, 4, 5 and 7) may have been based on stories told him by his friend Chink Dorman-Smith
Eric Dorman-Smith
Eric Edward Dorman-Smith , later de-Anglicised to Eric Edward Dorman O'Gowan, was a British Army soldier who served with distinction in World War I, and then seems to have become something of a bête noire to the British military establishment because of his lively mind, and unorthodox...
. The piece about a robbery and murder in Kansas City (Chapter 9), was inspired by newspaper story Hemingway covered while a cub reporter at the Kansas City Star. Chapter 2, and 11 - 16 were written after his first trip to Spain and depict the world of bullfighting.
In Our Time
Sixteen of the 18 vignettes published in in our time were incorporated into In Our Time as interchapter pieces and renumbered; two were rewritten as short stories—one was rewritten as the short story "The Revolutionist", and the love story was rewritten as "A Very Short StoryA Very Short Story
"A Very Short Story" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in as a vignette, or chapter, in the 1924 Paris edition titled in our time, and later rewritten and added as a story to Hemingway's first American short story collection In Our Time, published by Boni &...
". In Our Time includes 14 short stories, almost all written in 1924, and many are considered some of Hemingway's best short fiction.
The volume began with two stories linked thematically, set in Michigan, introducing young Nick Adams
Nick Adams (character)
Nick Adams is a fictional character, the protagonist of two dozen short stories by American author Ernest Hemingway, written in the 1920s and 30s...
: "Indian Camp" and "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife". "The End of Something" is a story about Nick as a teenager breaking up with a girl; the next story, "Three-Day Blow", has Nick and a friend Bill spending three days at a lake, drinking and talking. In "The Battler
The Battler
"The Battler" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. It was included in the collection In Our Time .In the story, Nick Adams is thrown from a train and finds temporary shelter at a campfire. There, he meets an ex-boxer named Ad Francis. Francis takes an immediate liking to Adams, who he...
", as he returns home from WWI, Nick meets a prize-fighter. This is followed by "A Very Short Story", a WWI love story set in Italy; "Soldier's Home" is set in Kansas; and "The Revolutionist" again is set in Italy. Three marriage stories follow: "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot", "Cat in the Rain" and "Out of Season". Nick reappears in "Cross Country Snow", set in Switzerland. "My Old Man" is set in Paris. The volume ends with the two-part story "The Big Two-Hearted River", set in Michigan and featuring Nick Adams. Newer editions of the volume begin with "On the Quai at Smyrna".
Themes and style
According to Hemingway scholar Wendolyn Tetlow the vignettes, interchapters and short stories published as different permutations of "In Our Time" are united thematically. In August 1923, after the publication of first six and the finalization of the next 12, Hemingway described them in a letter to Pound: "When they are read together, they all hook up....The bulls start, then reappear, then finish off. The war starts clear and noble just like it did...gets close and blurred and finished with the feller who goes home and gets clap." He went on to tell Pound, "it has form all right".The first interchapter was written as a single paragraph and first published in The Little Review. Reflective of the style of the finished work, it is tightly compressed showing Hemingway's utilization of Pound's imagist
Imagism
Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. This was in contrast to their contemporaries, the Georgian poets,...
theories, and in its detachment, echoes T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
. The small paragraph shows Hemingway, as Pound had done in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a long poem by Ezra Pound. It has been regarded as a turning point in Pound's career , and its completion was swiftly followed by his departure from England. The name "Selwyn" might have been an homage to Rhymers' Club member Selwyn Image. The name and personality of the...
, treating WWI with bitterness. Moreover, Hemingway took Pound's advice and used words sparingly—achieving the spareness of style for which he was to become famous.
Hemingway biographer James Mellow believes In Our Time to be Hemingway's most experimental book in that it transcends a mere collection of stories. He believes that in this, Hemingway's first published book, he established the primary themes to which he returned during his career as an author. The stories in the book establish themes such as initiation rites and early love, marriage problems, disappointment in family life, and the importance of male comradeship. The in our time vignettes, or interchapters, concern war, bullfighting and crime—all topics Hemingway returned to in his later work. Mellow believes the invention of Nick Adams was "vital to Hemingway's career". From the first story, "Indian Camp", which introduces Adams as a young boy, the character is a doppelgänger
Doppelgänger
In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
, a conduit through whom Hemingway expresses his own experiences. The second story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", considered by Mellow as one of Hemingway's major stories, is important because through Nick, Hemingway regales his childhood experiences with his parents.
"The Big-Two Hearted River", a two-part story, finishes the collection. It was designed and written to be the concluding and climatic piece of In Our Time. In describing the piece to Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
, Hemingway wrote he was "trying to do the country with Cézanne
Paul Cézanne
Paul Cézanne was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th...
." Nothing much happens in the story—nothing much is meant to happen. The surface details mask the deep inner turmoil Nick Adams feels after returning from the war; the sojourn on the river is to function as a place of tranquility and rehabilitation for him.
Reception and legacy
Hemingway's writing style attracted attention when in our time was published. Edmund WilsonEdmund Wilson
Edmund Wilson was an American writer and literary and social critic and noted man of letters.-Early life:Wilson was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a lawyer and served as New Jersey Attorney General. Wilson attended The Hill School, a college preparatory...
described the writing as "of the first destinction", enough to bring attention to the work.
In Our Time was praised by literary critics when it was published in 1925, and Mellow says of the book that it is one of Hemingway's masterpieces, although ironically his parents hated it and referred to it as "filth".
Sources
- Mellow, James. Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. (1992) New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3
- Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4
- Oliver, Charles (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2
- Smith, Paul. (1996). "1924: Hemingway's Luggage and the Miraculous Year". in Donaldson, Scott (ed). The Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway. New York: Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-45574-X
- Strong, Paul (1991). "The First Nick Adams Stories". Studies in Short Fiction. 28. pp. 83-91
- Tetlow, Wendolyn E. (1992). Hemingway's In our time: lyrical dimensions. Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8387-5219-5
- Wagner-Martin, Linda (2002). "Introduction". in Wagner-Martin, Linda (ed). Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP. ISBN 0-19-514573-9