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by: Ernest Hemingway
List Price: $14.00Amazon.com's Price: $11.20 You Save: $2.80 (20%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.52
EAN: 9780684822761
ISBN: 0684822768
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: January 31, 1996
Publisher: Scribner
Sales Rank: 5562
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
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.
Amazon.com:
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
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - The Book that Horrified Hemingway's Old Man
The story goes, that when Ernest Hemingway's parents first received copies of In Our Time, they were horrified and furious. His old man sent the books back to the publisher. A year later, in a letter to his father, Hemingway explained to his father what it was he was attempting as a young writer: "You see I am trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across - not to just depict life - or criticize it - but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me ... Read More
Rating:  - Hemingway at his best, the understated short story
Hemingway is the master of the understated short story. He takes simple themes and without use of superlatives, makes it real. This book is a collection of short stories where most feature a man name Nick, from his time as a young boy to manhood as it closes with two stories about him fishing. There is one story where no male name is given, so it may also be about Nick.
The most gripping story is "Soldier's Home", which features a character called Krebs. He is back in Kansas after serving ... Read More
Rating: - The essence of Hemingway is here
It is not true that Hemingway would go on to create works better than some of the stories in this work. In some of these short pieces we have the essential Hemingway, the best that he has to give. In fact his whole picture of the world, the emphasis on 'grace under pressure' the devastating effect of war and violence, the presentation of a kind of code hero, above all the simplicity and beauty of the language are here.
This is the beginning of Hemingway but it is also the essence and the best.
Rating: - Hemingway's Sketchbook
Reading the assembled vignettes and short stories of In Our Time, "Hemingway's American debut," is like taking a look at an artist's working sketches that eventually evolve into masterpieces. The reader finds all of the usual denizens of Hemingway's world: anglers, ex-patriates, toreadors, soldiers, men and women who are in love, and those who have fallen out. And, of course, Nick Adams. In these tales, Hemingway demonstrates the superfluousness of semicolons and the superiority of spartan sentences for ... Read More
Rating: - In Our Time
This is a fine collection of (exceedingly) short stories that deal with existential themes: nature, alienation, and death. In between the stories Hemingway includes even shorter vignettes of cruelty. Brief comments on the stories (with some plot spoilers) follow:
"On the Quai at Smyrna" - An American encounters casual cruelty among the Turks and Greeks during World War I.
"Indian Camp" - Nick Adams and his father, a scientific man who is quite detached from other people, visit ... Read More
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