Before Hemingway nobody wrote in this lean, tough manner. Hemingway, who worked as a journalist and war correspondent, completely changed the landscape of American fiction, and In Our Time is a good introduction to his works—a way of finding out whether his style is for you.
In Our Time contains the thoroughly enjoyable Nick Adams stories—‘Indian Camp,’ ‘The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife,’ ‘The Three Day Blow’, and ‘The Battler’—amongst other classic Hemingway tales such as the wonderful ‘Cat in the Rain’—a carefully constructed narrative in which not a single word is wasted. However, for me the real gems of this collection are the vignettes interspersed between the stories—short, violent paragraphs of war and death. This is Hemingway’s writing at its finest.
This is the 1930 edition including "On the Quai at Smyrna".
