In Our Time is the piece of writing that made Ernest Hemingway famous.

He published this collection

of short stories for the first time in 1925, to much praise. The collection revealed Hemingway's writing
style, which was completely different from the florid, extravagant style of writing than preceded him.
In Our Time, like all of Hemingway's writing, uses simple, declarative sentences with little or no
description of emotion. Yet, through this spare style, Hemingway was able to weave powerful and
moving stories. This new use of language counted as one of the major developments in modernist
literature. The modern period of literature began just after World War I and continued, many would
argue, up to and even through the second World War (1941-45 for America). Modernism incorporated
many different things, one of which was exploration and innovation in language. Hemingway's change
of language was simple, but powerful. Many critics have even called his writing more masculine than
nineteenth-century prose, like that of Henry James. In fact, one critic, Ann Douglas, argues that writers
such as Hemingway helped create a more masculine literary scene and society after World War I.
While In Our Time introduced Hemingway's revolutionary writing style, its content also made it
famous. Many authors attempted to write about World War I, but until In Our Time, few had succeeded.
Critics hailed this book as the first true analysis and depiction of the war. Hemingway's language
helped the stories ring true, as did his powerful scenes and his often confusing narrative flow. The
themes that Hemingway highlighted finally captured the spirit of the Great War. In the collection, he
writes about masculinity (often in connection with battling and sport), relationships between men and
women, bonding between members of the same sex, love, development and adaptation, maturity, and
responsibility. The way that he weaves the themes together creates a portrait of Americans before,
during, and after the war with which people seemed to identify. The stories about Nick Adams send him
through a rite of passage. He learns as a young child about birth and death (in "Indian Camp"). Then his
interactions with friends such as Bill and girlfriends such as Marjorie teach him about relationships. In
"The Battler," Nick is on the road for the first time and encounters more information from an old
fighter and his companion. Nothing prepares Nick for the war, though. That experience brings him back
home in "Big Two-Hearted River" a more mature, grateful, and masculine man.

Born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, near Chicago, Ernest Hemingway was the second of six children.
His father, a doctor, loved hunting and fishing and quickly taught these loves to young Hemingway. He
gave Hemingway his first gun when he was just ten. When Hemingway finished high school, World
War I was raging across Europe, and he wanted to enlist in the army. His father forbade him from
enlisting, however, so Hemingway became a reporter for the Kansas City Star, where he began to hone
his writing skills. Eventually, he grew restless and became an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in
Italy. After being injured, he recovered at a Milan hospital, where he had an affair with a nurse. He
returned home in 1919 but moved to Paris in 1921 to work as a reporter for the Toronto Daily Star.
There, he joined a group of expatriate writers and artists who would come to define the Lost
Generation, men and women whose early adulthood was defined by World War I. Gertrude Stein, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Pablo Picasso were among his circle of friends and colleagues.
Hemingway moved back to the United States in 1928, setting up a home in Key West, Florida, where
he lived for more than ten years. In 1937, he went to Spain as a reporter to cover the Spanish Civil War
for the North American Newspaper Alliance and eventually published For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940),
a novel based on his experiences. In the years that followed, he moved around a great deal, first to
Havana, Cuba, and then back to Europe to contribute to the war effort in World War II.
Hemingway published his first novel, The Torrents of Spring, in 1925 and The Sun Also Rises in 1926.
The latter novel was his first literary success and coincided with the end of his marriage to Hadley
Richardson. Hemingway went on to marry three more times and publish many more novels, including
A Farewell to Arms (1929), based on his experiences in Italy during World War I, and The Old Man
and the Sea (1952), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He also published many collections of short
stories, including In Our Time (1925), Men Without Women (1927), and Winner Take Nothing (1933) in
which A Clean, Well-Lighted Place first appeared. The range, skill, and influence of Hemingways
work won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place is one of Hemingways most acclaimed short stories, as much for its
exquisitely sparse writing style as for its expertly rendered existentialist themes. Existentialism is a
philosophical movement whose adherents believe that life has no higher purpose and that no higher
being exists to help us make sense of it. Instead, humans are left alone to find meaning in the world and
their lives. In A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, the older waiter sums up the despair that drives him and
others to brightly lit cafs by saying simply, It is a nothing.
Despite his great literary successes, Hemingway struggled with depression, alcoholism, and related
health problems throughout his life. In 1960, He died from self-inflicted gunshot wounds in 1961 at age
sixty-one.

ABOUT HIS SHORT STORIES

The importance of including Hemingway in American Literature anthologies cannot be overestimated.
Hemingway's style and subject matter are archetypal of American writing. Hemingway broke new
literary ground when he began publishing his short stories. Furthermore, not only was he an American
writer, but he was not an ivory-tower esthete; he was a man's man. He hunted in grand style, deep-sea
fished, covered both World War I and World War II for national news services, and was married as
many times as Hollywood celebrities and yet he found time to write novels and stories that feature
men and women facing both death and emotional crises with grit, gumption, and grand tenacity.
Hemingway's heroes are characterized by their unflinching integrity. They do not compromise. They
are vulnerable but are not defined by their vulnerability. Hemingway's men and women are often
defiant of what society expects of them: They eat with gusto, devour adventure, and have sex simply
and directly.
In the beginning, Hemingway wrote about himself, and he would continue to write himself into all, or
most, of his characters until his death. His first persona was Nick Adams, a young boy who
accompanies a doctor to an American Indian camp and watches the doctor use a jackknife to slice into a
woman's abdomen and deliver a baby boy.
At that early age, Nick vows never to die. Later, he defies death and the sanity-threatening wounds that
he receives in Italy during World War I. He rotely repeats, in blind faith, the knee-bending exercises for
his stiff, battle-scarred knee. Instinctively, he returns to the north woods of Michigan to heal his soul of
the trauma of war. Hemingway himself suffered a bad knee wound during the war and returned to
hunting and fishing in Michigan's northern woods.
In his more mature stories, such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis
Macomber," Hemingway creates far more complex characters and situations for his characters.
"Snows" is a stylistic tour de force, a perfect dovetailing of intense, invigorating, interior-monologue
flashbacks as contrasts to sections of present-time narratives, during which the main character, a writer
named Harry, is slowly dying of gangrene. Symbolically, Harry is also rotting away because of the
poisonous nature of his wife's money. As his life ebbs away, he realizes that his writing talent has been
ebbing away for years, as surely as his life is, symbolized by the hyena and the buzzards who wait to
feast on his carcass.
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" and "Hills Like White Elephants" are examples of Hemingway's most
pared-down style, in which he removes himself from the role of narrator. The stories are almost wholly
composed of dialogue. One must engage him or herself in the narratives and ignite his or her
imagination to understand the emotional core of each of these stories. Hemingway expects us to.
Hemingway's genius as an American original was evident long before he produced his novels that are
today considered masterpieces of American literature. Both critics and readers have hailed his short
stories as proof that a pure, true American literature was finally possible. American literature was no
longer merely watered-down British reading fare. American literature had at last come into its own.
Hemingway set the standard and the writers who came after him honored his achievement.