Portrait of the Artist as a Very Different Young Man - Ernest Hemingway’s First Short Story Collection: In Our Time (1925)

I only began reading Hemingway last year, and then only because I heard Margaret Atwood tout his first short story collection, In Our Time (1925), as “game-changing” on NPR (you can listen to the following exchange for yourself here).

Margaret Atwood: “There’s a Hemingway story in which a young man is having a campout with his girlfriend, and she realizes that things aren’t the same and she says, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he says, ‘It’s not fun anymore.’ So I think there are points in your life — for everybody’s life — when they think, ‘It’s not fun anymore.’ It’s a pretty crushing thing to say.”

Rachel Martin, NPR: “I guess, but like, I don’t know. Ernest Hemingway I don’t want to hold up as my romantic role model.”

Margaret Atwood: “It’s not a question of romantic role model: it’s a question of good story writer. And no matter what you may think of Hemingway’s private life, which I know too much about, In Our Time is one of the game-changing story collections of the 20th-century. He was a nightmare as a husband and romantic partner, but that’s . . . a different thing.”

I’m glad I took Atwood’s suggestion, and I’m excited about this opportunity to work through the rich layers of these deceptively simple tales as a group. First published 101 years ago, by an author I now describe as ‘The Artist as a Very Different Young Man’, the stories of In Our Time still move with the weight, heft and athleticism of an Olympian.

The early twenty-something Hemingway who wrote the stories published as In Our Time introduced modernist techniques never before seen in the American short story. He employs them in the service of speaking the unspeakable: the First World War and its traumatic aftermath, both on the men (mostly) who served and the women (mostly) and family and friends to whom they returned. 

Hemingway’s questioning of traditional narrative techniques is of a piece with his questioning of the concept of what it meant to be alive in the United States of the post WWI early 20th-century. 

Here is the Hemingway week-by-week reading schedule, plus a note about which edition to use:

• 13 November, pp. 3-26. Indian Camp, The Doctor’s Wife, The End of Something
• 20 November, pp. 27-55. The Three-Day Blow, The Battler
• 27 November, pp. 57-78.  A Very Short Story, Soldier’s Home, The Revolutionist
• 4 December, pp. 79-104. Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, A Cat in the Rain, Out of Season
• 11 December, pp. 105-132. Cross-Country Snow, My Old Man
• 18 December, pp. 133-163. Big Two-Hearted River: Parts I & II

Whether you join the full study or dip in for individual sessions (see below), it’s important to use the suggested Vintage edition of In Our Time because it provides the best foundation for understanding Hemingway’s work if you access the full text of these short stories, including the italicized one-page texts that precede each one. These represent a key part of Hemingway’s modernist stylistic enterprise and go a long way towards explaining history and context for his protagonists and the worlds in which they live.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Six week study (on Zoom) led by Professor Nancy Goldstein
• Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK), 13 November – 18 December 2025
• Recommended edition: In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, Vintage Classics, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0593311820 – PLEASE NOTE THAT THERE ARE A NUMBER OF EDITIONS AVAILABLE , we ask you to use this one as it is complete (and others are not!)
• £200 for six meeting study (or email us to book individual sessions at £40 each)

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REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. If you would like to be considered for a reduced-fee place please email us at litsalon@gmail.com (your details will be treated as confidential).