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Home , A Farewell to Arms, A Moveable Feast, Cross Country Snow, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Indian Camp, In Another Country

The Stories by Ernest

About the author Hemingway scholar Philip Young writes: StoryLines Midwest was born in Oak Park, Illinois, “Hemingway’s world is one in which things do Discussion Guide No. 5 in July 1899. At 19, he joined the war in Europe as not grow and bear fruit, but explode, break, an ambulance driver, was wounded, fell in love decompose, or are eaten away. It is saved from by David Long with his nurse, and came home to Oak Park and total misery by visions of endurance, compe- StoryLines Midwest the family’s summer house in Michigan. He tence, and courage. . .by a pleasure in the Literature Consultant later returned to and began writing fiction. countries one can visit, or fish and hunt in, and After the success of his short fiction and first the cafes one can sit in, and by very little else.” novel, Hemingway increasingly became a public Do you agree? What sort of world view does this figure, known for enthusiasms that included describe? bullfighting, fly-fishing, big game hunting, deep- sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. He married four Additional readings times, traveled widely, lived in Spain and Cuba, . Ernest Hemingway: , Wyoming, and Idaho. In 1954, he A Life Story, 1969. became the third American to be awarded the Anthony Burgess. Ernest Hemingway and Nobel Prize for Literature. He was hospitalized at His World, 1978. the Mayo Clinic in 1961 for severe depression; F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Short Stories of F. Scott later that summer, at his home in Ketchum, Fitzgerald: A New Collection, 1989. Idaho, he took his own life. Ernest Hemingway. , 1926. , 1929. Discussion questions , 1940. Hemingway reinvigorated the short story form by , 1952. stripping it down to bare events, by leaving some The Complete Short Stories of Ernest things unsaid. For instance, Nick concludes Hemingway: The Finca Vigia Edition, 1987 his description of the dead after a battle (“A Way , 1964. You’ll Never Be”) with this sentence: “The hot weather had swollen them all alike regardless of nationality.” Does this restraint correspond to Hemingway’s outlook on the world? In what ways?

What values and sensibilities inform the charac- ter of Nick Adams in these stories? Can they be described as “Midwestern” in any way? What about some of the other characters? What is it about northern Michigan that helps Hemingway StoryLines to express the themes that are important to him? America StoryLines America is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and A Radio/Library administered by the American Library Association to expand American understanding of human experience and cultural Partnership Exploring Our heritage. Additional support from Barnes & Noble ©2001 American Library Association Regional Literature by Ernest Hemingway

Northern Michigan, the setting for many of the The Nick Adams Stories can be thought of as In “,” “,” and Throughout The Nick Adams Stories, even in stories in this book, exerted a powerful pull on “the education of Nick Adams.” If there’s a “A Way You’ll Never Be,” Nick is a soldier recov- unfinished pieces such as “The Last Good Ernest Hemingway’s imagination throughout central idea at work, it’s coming to terms ering from war wounds. Hemingway, a Red Country,” it’s not hard to find classic Hemingway his life. Hemingway’s family, who lived in with loss. Nick is a boy on a fishing trip with his Cross ambulance driver in Italy during the First sentences: Oak Park, Illinois, summered at Walloon Lake, father and uncle when we first meet him in World War, took 227 pieces of shrapnel in his near Petoskey, Michigan. His son wrote that “.” The father, like Hemingway’s, is legs when an Austrian shell exploded near him. The water from the spring was cold and Hemingway told “wonderful stories” about his a doctor, called upon to perform an emergency He managed to help a wounded Italian fresh in the tin pail and the chocolate was not life in Michigan, and wished he could have Cesarean section on an Indian woman, using soldier to safety, then was hit, also in the leg, by quite bitter but was hard and crunched as stayed a boy there forever. A few months before no more than a jackknife and fishing line. The machine gun fire. A similarly wounded soldier, they chewed it. his death in 1961, Hemingway wrote, “The best father is a man of intense self-control; he wishes Frederic Henry, would be the central figure of sky was in Italy or Spain and in Northern in the end he’d not given Nick this harrowing what many consider Hemingway’s finest novel, A It’s a prose rich in unadorned nouns and verbs, Michigan in the Fall.” glimpse into adult realities. The story introduces Farewell to Arms (1929). Likewise, Nick’s fear of in short, physical Anglo-Saxon words. It has a When Ernest Hemingway died, he left behind us to the image of death in Hemingway’s work death, coming at the onset of darkness and stark, confident sound, often said to be “biblical,” thousands of pages of unpublished writing— (it’s never far off, especially ), as well as to preventing him from sleeping, is an image that achieved by carefully repeating key words, work he thought unfit for publication and work the motif of fathers and sons. surfaces repeatedly in Hemingway’s work. by seldom subordinating one idea to another, never finished. Much of it, including The Nick “” and “The Three-Day “Big Two-Hearted River” shows Nick after joining them instead with a succession of Adams Stories, has since seen print. Nick Blow,” also set in the woods of northern the war, trout fishing alone in the solitude of “and”s or “but”s. Hemingway wanted readers to Adams was the first of Hemingway’s alter egos, Michigan, treat the ending of a love affair, and, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Little happens experience his imagery directly, with a and the prototype for the Hemingway hero. The along with “Cross-Country Snow,” show Nick’s here, except for the rudiments of camping, yet minimum of authorial intrusion. stories featuring Nick were among the earliest stubborn ambivalence about relationships with we can see in Nick’s mindful, almost ritualistic As often happens to the reputation of an writing Hemingway published; they appeared, women. Critics have argued that the first two of actions, a young man trying to heal himself. artist, especially one whose work is revolutionary accompanied by non-Nick stories, in three these properly belong to the time before Nick We can feel, as one critic has written, “the most or who becomes a larger-than-life public figure, collections, In Our Time (1925), Men Without leaves for the war. precarious state of nervous tension which he is Hemingway’s underwent waves of reevaluation, Women (1927), and (1933). “The Killers,” among Hemingway’s most desperately holding under clenched control.” during his lifetime and afterward. His prose This new volume arranges the stories, for the celebrated stories, relies on pitch-perfect, darkly Like many Hemingway short stories, “Big Two- style, his existential outlook, his white-bearded first time, according to Nick’s age, and adds eight comic dialog to sharpen its air of menace. Hearted River” is a masterpiece of the unsaid. “Papa Hemingway” persona were often pieces found among Hemingway’s manuscripts. Gangsters come to a diner looking for a retired The Nick Adams Stories concludes with parodied. Some readers found racism or Reading the complete set of Nick Adams fighter named Ole Andreson. Nick and the cook “Fathers and Sons.” Nick is now 38, the writer anti-Semitism in the man and the writing; others stories is illuminating for at least two reasons: are tied up in the kitchen and everyone waits. he’d vowed to become in the earlier stories. objected to his depiction of women. And yet, as we get a fuller accounting of Nick’s life, Later, when Nick is freed, he goes to warn His son asleep beside him, Nick drives through Frederick Busch affirms, “The work remains, and we’re given a view of Hemingway’s writerly Andreson, and is stunned by the man’s passive quail-hunting country thinking about his own the art functions . . . [it] works awfully effectively judgment in action. The better-known and acceptance of his fate. “I can’t stand to think father, for whom he still has deeply mixed feelings. on the soul of a reader who is not rigidly, revered of these stories are stronger—mature about him waiting in the room and knowing Writer Ford Maddox Ford famously said that ideologically insensible to it.” and confident. The basic Hemingway themes are he’s going to get it. It’s too damned awful,” Nick Hemingway’s words seem like “pebbles already in place: the emotional desolation says. “Well,” the owner of the diner replies, “you fetched fresh from a brook.” Of all Hemingway’s felt by young survivors of the Great War (a “lost better not think about it.” achievements, his prose style may be his generation,” dubbed them); the enduring legacy. Its simplicity was deliberate— presence of fear as a basic human condition; a purification, a purging of all that was fussy and the need to live authentically, to have “grace overblown about the Victorian sensibility. under pressure.”