Introduction: In the Beginning

Summary

IN JANUARY 1924, HEMINGWAY — himself twenty-four, seven months older than the century — sailed back to France from a stint as journalist for the Toronto Star, determined to quit reporting in order to concentrate on his fiction writing. He was serving as a Red Cross volunteer in Italy when he was wounded in the First World War two weeks before his nineteenth birthday by the explosion of a trench mortar shell; thus he knew the war without ever having been a soldier in it. Now, with no regular job, he and his wife Hadley, together with their son Jack (nicknamed Bumby), would live on the income from her trust fund and on whatever else Hemingway could make by selling poems or stories, a very limited market. At this time he was the author of two small pamphlets printed in fewer than 300 copies each: Three Stories and Ten Poems, 64 pages, published by Robert McAlmon in 1923, and in our time, 30 pages, finally handset and published by Bill Bird in March of 1924 (of the three-hundred-copy print run only 170 arrived from the printer intact; neither pamphlet sold out in the first year of publication). This first in our time (note lower-case title) consisted of sixteen two- and three-paragraph narratives that would become the numbered interchapters of 1925’s more substantial In Our Time. In February of 1925 Hemingway received a cable from the publishers Boni and Liveright in New York offering a contract for his short-story collection, as well as a contract offer from his future publisher Scribners that arrived after he had accepted Liveright’s offer; by this time Hemingway already had a substantial reputation. He was well known in Paris’s English-language literary circles, in part based on his charisma and enthusiastic self-confidence. He worked as assistant editor to Ford Madox Ford on the transatlantic review, and when that folded, helped editors Ernest Walsh and Ethel Moorhead with their This Quarter; both journals published his fiction and paid him for it. Poet Archibald MacLeish, later Librarian of Congress and Assistant Secretary of State, who met Hemingway in 1924, said of him, “The only [other] person I have ever known who could exhaust the oxygen in a room the way Ernest could was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” Eugene Jolas, in a November 1924 column for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, wrote, “Dear Hemingway.