The Sun Also Rises
Published the next year — the style scaled up to a novel.
In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway
In Our Time
The debut story collection where the modern American short story was invented — trout streams, war flashes, and Nick Adams.
- 1925
- 156
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeAlternating between the Michigan woods of Nick Adams's youth and one-paragraph flashes of war, bullring, and execution, Hemingway's first real book is the style's laboratory: stories like 'Big Two-Hearted River' in which a man fishes a burned-over country and the war is never once mentioned — and is everywhere. Assembled in Paris under Pound's editing eye, it announced everything that followed.
Why we recommend it
'Big Two-Hearted River'
A man makes camp and fishes for thirty pages; nothing happens; it is one of the greatest war stories ever written. The iceberg theory's proof of concept.
The interchapters
Six-sentence flashes of violence between the stories — a formal experiment nobody has improved on in a century.
Paris fingerprints everywhere
Shaped between the rue du Cardinal Lemoine and Pound's studio, with Stein's rhythms in its ear — this is the Paris apprenticeship, published.
What this book explores
- The war's shadow
- Masculinity
- The craft
Bring it to book club
- Read 'Big Two-Hearted River' knowing nothing, then reread it as a war story. What changes?
- What do the violent interchapters do to the quiet stories around them?
- Which single story most clearly predicts the writer Hemingway became?
Readers may also like
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms
Nick's war, given a full book.
The Old Man and the Sea
The same discipline, twenty-seven years on.
Black Spring
Henry Miller
Black Spring
Another writer breaking form into fragments — with the opposite temperament.