Since the very identity of In Our Time is bound up with the fact of its startling freshness, its originality, both in terms of technique and subject matter, there are few literary precedents.

In the most general terms, of course, there have been very many bildungsroman novels that deal with a young man growing up and going off to experience the horror of war. But if the reader seeks more specific literary models the closest precedents may be found in James Joyce's Dubliners (1914), an intensely modernist and highly wrought story- cycle, and in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a storycycle or loosely structured bildungsroman. Hemingway knew and was influenced by both of these writers, both of these works.