SOURCE: Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. “Hemingway's In Our Time: A Cubist Anatomy.” The Hemingway Review 17, no. 2 (spring 1998): 31-46.

In the following essay, Brogan investigates the genre and aesthetics of In Our Time.

We know that the final long version of In Our Time, specifically the 1925 short story collection and its 1930 reprinting with “On the Quai at Smyrna” as “Introduction by the Author,” was in no way initially planned by the young artist Ernest Hemingway. Starting from the early, short, and visually interesting collection of vignettes—the three mountains press in our time of 1923—Hemingway seems to have devised and rejected various ordering principles for his first sustained work, recasting certain sketches as named stories, and in the long version, deleting Nick Adams as the possible implied author.¹ These facts, taken with the complicated publishing history of the various stories constituting In Our Time, account in part for the long...