In Our Time
Published in 1925, In Our Timemarked the American debut of the young Ernest Hemingway. A selection of fourteen short stories and fifteen vignettes, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple use of language to convey complex emotions, earning Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein. "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler" introduce readers to the young Nick Adams and to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose enlivened by an ear for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic. And like a painter, Hemingway succeeds in suggesting--through a single gesture or statements--a sense of moral value revealing beneath his cool, objective manner, a clarity of heart. In Our Time,Edmund Wilson wrote, "has more artistic dignity than any other book that has been written by an American about the period of the war." Now recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, it also provides a key to Hemingway's later works.