Three Stories and Ten Poems

The thinness was involuntary: in December 1922 a valise containing virtually all of Hemingway's manuscripts — stories, a partial novel, the carbons too — was stolen from Hadley's train compartment in the Gare de Lyon, the most famous lost luggage in American letters. What survived was what happened to be elsewhere: 'Up in Michigan,' shoved in a drawer after Gertrude Stein pronounced it unpublishable, and 'My Old Man,' out with an editor. 'Out of Season' and the poems came after. When Robert McAlmon — expatriate writer, heir by marriage, and proprietor of the Contact Publishing Co. — offered to make a book, this was everything there was.

The three hundred copies sold slowly out of Paris bookshops, Sylvia Beach's among them, and reviews were few — but the stories announce the whole project: the flat declaratives, the withheld emotion, the sentences with their freight below the waterline. Within three years the author of this pamphlet-sized debut had published The Sun Also Rises. Surviving copies now trade like relics, which is what they are: the modern American style, in its first three hundred instances.

The three stories carry the book: 'Up in Michigan,' the blunt, painful seduction story Stein called inaccrochable; 'Out of Season,' a Tyrolean fishing excursion curdling around a marriage and a drunk guide — the first story built on the theory of omission; and 'My Old Man,' a boy's-eye account of a crooked jockey father, the most conventional of the three and the one the anthologies took first. The ten poems are period pieces — clipped, satiric, Kiplingesque by way of the Chicago school — interesting now chiefly as the sound of the prose writer clearing his throat.

An hour's read and a founding document: the shelf's shortest distance between apprentice and master.