In Our Time

2021 Reprint of the 1925 Edition. The stories' themes - of alienation, loss, grief, separation - continue the work Hemingway began with the vignettes, which include descriptions of acts of war, bullfighting and current events. The collection is known for its spare language and oblique depiction of emotion, through a style known as Hemingway's "theory of omission." Critics have long recognized In Our Time as a major development in American literature and Modernism. Edmund Wilson, in one of the first reviews, gave the collection high praise and wrote that Hemingway "almost invented a form of his own". In Wilson's view, the book was a break-through with "more artistic dignity than anything else about the period of the war that has as yet been written by an American." Now recognized as one of the most original short story collections in twentieth-century literature, In Our Time provides a key to Hemingway's later works. In Our Time is Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord". The collection's publication history was complex. It began with six prose vignettes commissioned by Ezra Pound for a 1923 edition of The Little Review; Hemingway added twelve more and in 1924 compiled the in our time edition (with a lower-case title), which was printed in Paris. To these were added fourteen short stories for the 1925 edition, including "Indian Camp" and "Big Two-Hearted River", two of his best-known Nick Adams stories. He composed "On the Quai at Smyrna" for the 1930 edition. Our edition reprints the 1925 Edition by Boni & Liveright.