In Our Time [Hardcover]

Ernest Hemingway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 20, 1995

THIS COLLECTION OF SHORT STORIES AND VIGNETTES MARKED ERNEST HEMINGWAY'S AMERICAN DEBUT AND MADE HIM FAMOUS. When In Our Time was published in 1925, it was praised by Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald for its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period. In Our Time contains several early Hemingway classics, including the famous Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and "The Battler," and introduces readers to the hallmarks of the Hemingway style: a lean, tough prose -- enlivened by an car for the colloquial and an eye for the realistic that suggests, through the simplest of statements, a sense of moral value and a clarity of heart.

Now recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, In Our Time provides a key to Hemingway's later works.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

No writer has been more efficiently overshadowed by his imitators than Ernest Hemingway. From the moment he unleashed his stripped-down, declarative sentences on the world, he began breeding entire generations of miniature Hemingways, who latched on to his subtractive style without ever wondering what he'd removed, or why. And his tendency to lapse into self-parody during the latter half of his career didn't help matters. But In Our Time, which Hemingway published in 1925, reminds us of just how fresh and accomplished his writing could be--and gives at least an inkling of why Ezra Pound could call him the finest prose stylist in the world.

In his first commercially published book (following the small-press appearance of Three Stories and Ten Poems in 1924), Hemingway was still wearing his influences on his sleeve. The vignettes between each story smack of Gertrude Stein, whose minimalist punctuation and clodhopping rhythms he was happy to borrow. "My Old Man" sounds like Huck Finn on the Grand Tour: "Well, we went to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live I've ever seen in all my life." But in the "The Battler" or "Indian Camp" or "Big Two-Hearted River," Hemingway finds his own voice, shunning the least hint of rhetorical inflation and sticking to just the facts, ma'am. His reluctance to traffic in high-flown abstraction has often been chalked up to postwar disillusion--as though he were too much of a simpleton to make deliberate stylistic decisions. Still, nobody can read "Soldier's Home" without drawing a certain connection between the two. Returning home to Oklahoma, the hero finds that his tales of combat are now a bankrupt genre:

Even his lies were not sensational at the pool room. His acquaintances, who had heard detailed accounts of German women found chained to machine guns in the Argonne forest and who could not comprehend, or were barred by their patriotism from interest in, any German machine gunners who were not chained, were not thrilled by his stories.

If we are to believe Michael Reynolds and Ann Douglas, this passage reflects the author's own dreary homecoming as a member of the lost generation. It's also a fine example of a surprisingly rare phenomenon, at least at this point in his career: Hemingway being funny. --James Marcus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899, Ernest Hemingway served in the Red Cross during World War I as an ambulance driver and was severely wounded in Italy. He moved to Paris in 1921, devoted himself to writing fiction, and soon became part of the expatriate community, along with Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford. He revolutionized American writing with his short, declarative sentences and terse prose. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, and his classic novella THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. Known for his larger-than-life personality and his passions for bullfighting, fishing, and big-game hunting, he died in Ketchum, Idaho, on July 2, 1961.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 158 pages
• Publisher: Amereon Ltd (November 20, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0848817559
• ISBN-13: 978-0848817558
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (59 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,187,468 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ernest Hemingway ranks as the most famous of twentieth-century American writers; like Mark Twain, Hemingway is one of those rare authors most people know about, whether they have read him or not. The difference is that Twain, with his white suit, ubiquitous cigar, and easy wit, survives in the public imagination as a basically, lovable figure, while the deeply imprinted image of Hemingway as rugged and macho has been much less universally admired, for all his fame. Hemingway has been regarded less as a writer dedicated to his craft than as a man of action who happened to be afflicted with genius. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1954, Time magazine reported the news under Heroes rather than Books and went on to describe the author as "a globe-trotting expert on bullfights, booze, women, wars, big game hunting, deep sea fishing, and courage." Hemingway did in fact address all those subjects in his books, and he acquired his expertise through well-reported acts of participation as well as of observation; by going to all the wars of his time, hunting and fishing for great beasts, marrying four times, occasionally getting into fistfights, drinking too much, and becoming, in the end, a worldwide celebrity recognizable for his signature beard and challenging physical pursuits.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars IN OUR TIME, February 7, 2004

By 

Patrick - See all my reviews

This review is from: In Our Time (Paperback)

In Our Time is a great collection of Ernest Hemingway's early short stories, which he wrote when he was at his peak as a writer. I love the way he uses simple descriptions and dialogue to narrate them, giving a more natural feel to the stories. You can see his tough writing style beginning to show already at this point of his career. Most parts will be confusing to the novice reader because Hemingway really wants you to infer what the stories are about - he will not go right out and tell you. There really is no single theme to this whole book, but it basically shows how life was back in the 1920's. Many of Hemingway's works were based on his own experiences in life, which is very interesting. "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" was based on the author's own father, who was, in Hemingway's mind, a coward. "Soldier's Home" is an excellent story of a distressed soldier coming home from The Great War. "A Very Short Story" was based on Hemingway's own romance with a nurse while he was overseas during the war. "Indian Camp" and "The Battler" are two of my favorites. It has been said that the character Nick Adams was really Hemingway, and when you read the Nick Adams stories along with a biography on Hemingway's life, it is easy to see why. Each story in this collection has a meaning unto itself, and I highly recommend that you read all of them.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dazzling, perfectly crafted gems, April 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: In Our Time (Paperback)

This is by far my favorite Hemingway. To the newcomer: please don't be fooled by the simple style and the often elliptical exposition. There is so much more here than is evident on a first reading. It takes a while to discover the complexity of Hemingway's themes and the emotional strings he pulls because his style is so spare, strong, and perfect. Like small, meticulously arranged blocks, with brilliant vignettes between them as mortar, he builds a stirring and often frightening image of the twentieth century. Everything is here--young love, political violence, adolescent confusion, social displacement, racial conflict, industrial hegemony and decline, every sort of relationship fissure.

Sometimes his genuis is almost eerie--read "Soldier's Home," and try to analyse how such basic words and sentences can weave such a poignant, aching emotional web. His work had an almost magical presence in those early years, before egotism and the media made him self-conscious.

Even if you are familiar with his more celebrated novels, read this collection and you will be overwhelmed by the beauty, power, and honesty of Hemingway at his best.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply the Master, February 12, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: In Our Time (Hardcover)

These short pages contain simply (but less simply than some readers realize) some of the best short stories by an American writer in the entire twentieth century. Hemingway is certainly lauded enough by high-minded literary types, but it would be a mistake to assume that those are the only people that can enjoy him. It is tough to get a handle on what he is doing in this book, particularly because of the interchapers (which are NOT lead-ins to the stories following them, but a separate bit of impressionist writing of their own), but as in all great writing, the point is to make you ask yourself questions, not answer them for you. My personal favorite from this book (and maybe of any book by anybody) is "Soldier's Home" Hemingway's style, which is often criticized for being "too simple", thus ignorant, is to leave the most important details unsaid, letting the reader create most of the image in his or her mind. When in "Soldier's Home" Krebs' mother says "There can be no idle hands in God's Kingdom" Hemingway writes Krebs' reply as simply "I'm not in His kingdom." No description of his voice, no laying of scene, nothing but that pure powerful statement, which would have been ruined by a long dramatic monologue on the horrors of war. If you enter this book with an open mind, Hemingway won't disappoint. And you'll have plenty to argue about with your high-minded literary friends.