In his preface to The Nick Adams Stories [see excerpt above], Philip Young quite correctly notes that the eight hitherto unpublished sketches and fragments add new dimension to our understanding of one of Hemingway's earliest fictional protagonists. Indeed, by bringing all the fiction involving Nick Adams together into a single volume, Professor Young has performed a needed and important service for Hemingway scholarship. If one was uncertain before, one can be certain now that Hemingway must have, at one time, planned a story cycle or novel featuring Nick as the central character—something similar to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or William Faulkner's The Unvanquished.

It is equally certain that The Nick Adams Stories does not have the esthetic continuity achieved in the aforementioned works; nor is Nick Adams as consistently characterized or developed as are George Willard and Bayard Sartoris. Indeed, one may further assert that, valuable as...