Reading Order
In Our TimeErnest Hemingway Early Works Reading Order
Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925) was his first major work — a collection of linked stories and vignettes, alternating between the Nick Adams stories (a young man's coming of age through fishing, hunting, war, and loss) and the brutal inter-chapter vignettes (bullfights, executions, war) that give the book its title. The formal innovation of the collection — the gap between what is explicitly stated and what is implied — established what became known as the 'iceberg theory' of prose style, and influenced virtually every subsequent American short story writer.
Where to start
In Our Time
Complete In Our Time Book List
- 1Buy
In Our Time
Ernest Hemingway·1925·Start here — Hemingway's breakthrough collection and the fullest early statement of his prose method; the Nick Adams stories establish the character who will recur throughout his career, and the inter-chapter vignettes demonstrate his compression at its most extreme. - 2Buy
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway·1926·Hemingway's first novel, published the year after In Our Time — the same themes of war damage, sexual wound, and the search for meaning through activity extended into a full-length narrative; Jake Barnes in Paris and Pamplona is Nick Adams grown up and named differently. - 3Buy
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway·1929·Hemingway's most perfectly structured novel — a love story set against the Italian campaign of World War I, with an ending that strikes almost every reader as among the most devastating in American fiction; the fullest expression of the tragic worldview that In Our Time establishes. - 4Buy
The Nick Adams Stories
Ernest Hemingway·1972·The collected Nick Adams stories, assembled after Hemingway's death — including stories from In Our Time, Men Without Women, and other collections, plus previously unpublished material; the complete portrait of the character who runs through all the early work. - 5Buy
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway·1952·The Nobel Prize-winning novella — the old Cuban fisherman Santiago, the great marlin, and the sharks; the most fable-like of Hemingway's major works and the clearest statement of his code: you can be destroyed but you cannot be defeated.
In Our Time — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the iceberg theory in Hemingway?
Hemingway described his prose method as the 'iceberg theory' or the 'theory of omission': the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The writer who knows what he is writing about can omit things, and the reader will still feel those things. In In Our Time, this means stories where the emotional subject is never directly stated — Big Two-Hearted River, for instance, is a story about a young man fishing in Michigan that is really about a veteran's post-traumatic attempt to recover equilibrium by concentrating intensely on the physical world.
Who is Nick Adams?
Nick Adams is the semi-autobiographical protagonist of many of Hemingway's early stories — a young man from Michigan who grows up through experiences of war, violence, love, and loss; based partly on Hemingway himself. Nick appears as a child in 'Indian Camp,' as an adolescent in 'The End of Something,' as a soldier in 'A Very Short Story' and the inter-chapter vignettes of In Our Time, and as a veteran trying to recover in 'Big Two-Hearted River.' He is the character in whom Hemingway first developed the sensibility and the prose method that he would deploy throughout his career.
Should I read In Our Time before The Sun Also Rises?
Yes — In Our Time is the best preparation for The Sun Also Rises because it establishes the prose method, the emotional territory, and the Nick Adams sensibility that Jake Barnes extends; reading the stories first makes the novel's compression and its method of implication legible. However, The Sun Also Rises is more immediately accessible as a standalone, and many readers come to In Our Time after the novel, retroactively understanding where the technique came from.
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