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Nick Adams Stories Reissue Edition, Kindle Edition
The complete collection of Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams two dozen stories are gathered here in one volume, grouped together according to the major time periods in the protagonist's life. Based on Hemingway's own experiences as a boy and as a member of the Red Cross ambulance corps in World War I. The collection follows Nick's life as a child to parent, along with soldier, veteran, and writer and feature some of Hemingway's earliest work such as "Indian Camp" and some of his best-known short stories, including "Big Two-Hearted River." Perfect for longtime Hemingway fans and as an introduction to one of America's most famous writers.
- ISBN-13978-0684169408
- EditionReissue
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateNovember 24, 2009
- LanguageEnglish
- File size392 KB
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About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
"Of the place where he had been a boy he had written well enough. As well as he could then." So thought a dying writer in an early version of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The writer of course was Hemingway. The place was the Michigan of his boyhood summers, where he remembered himself as Nick Adams. As well as be could write then was very well indeed.
Until now, however, the stories involving Nick have always appeared so many to a book, in jumbled sequence. As a result the coherence of his adventures has been obscured, and their impact fragmented. In Men Without Women, Hemingway's second collection of stories, Nick appears first as a soldier in Italy, next as an adolescent in Summit, Illinois, then in turn as a younger boy in Michigan, a married man in Austria, and a soldier back in Italy. Or consider the trouble with "Big Two-Hearted River," one of the best-known Hemingway stories. Placed where it was -- at the end of In Our Time, the first collection -- it puzzled a good many readers. Put where it goes chronologically, following the stories of World War I, its submerged tensions -- the impression that Nick is exorcising some nameless anxiety -- become perfectly understandable. But "A Way You'll Never Be," which precedes "Big Two-Hearted River" in time and explains it, was published eight years and several books after it.
Arranged in chronological sequence, the events of Nick's life make up a meaningful narrative in which a memorable character grows from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's own life. In this arrangement Nick Adams, who for a long time was not widely recognized as a consistent character at all, emerges clearly as the first in a long line of Hemingway's fictional selves. Later versions, from Jake Barnes and Frederic Henry to Richard Cantwell and Thomas Hudson, were all to have behind them part of Nick's history and, correspondingly, part of Hemingway's.
As is true for many writers of fiction, the relationship between Hemingway's work and the events of his own life is an immediate and intricate one. In some stories he appears to report details of actual experience as faithfully as he might have entered them in a diary. In others the play of his imagination has transformed experience into a new and different reality. Exploring the connections between actuality and fiction in Hemingway can be an absorbing activity, and readers who wish to pursue it are referred to the biographical studies listed at the end of this preface. But Hemingway naturally intended his stories to be understood and enjoyed without regard for such considerations -- as they have been for a long time.
The first Nick Adams fiction appeared almost a half-century ago, the last in 1933, and over the years a great deal has been written about it. Among the unpublished manuscripts Hemingway left behind him, however, eight new contributions to the over-all narrative were discovered. Presented here for the first time, inserted in the places in time where the events fall, they are varied in length and apparent purpose. Three accounts -- of how the Indians left the country of Nick's boyhood, of his first sight of the Mississippi, and of what happened just before and after his wedding -- are quite brief. If the author had larger plans for any of them, such are unknown; they might be read simply as sketches in an artist's notebook. In two other cases his plans are self-evident, for here we have the beginnings of works that were never completed. Nick on board the Chicago, bound for France during World War I, was the start of a novel called Along with Youth that was abandoned long ago. Similarly, though much later, the plot of "The Last Good Country" was left in mid-air, and many pages would have been required to resolve it. Two other pieces are known to have originated in Nick stories already published. "Three Shots" tells how the young boy became frightened while on a camping trip. It once preceded the story called "Indian Camp." And Nick's "stream of consciousness" reflections on his writing career once (anachronistically) concluded "Big Two-Hearted River." Of these new works only "Summer People," very likely the first fiction Hemingway wrote about Nick Adams, can be regarded as a full-length, completed story.
To distinguish them from previously published works, all the new materials in this book have been printed in a special "oblique" type. If the decision to publish them at all is questioned, justification is available. For one thing, the plan for rearranging the Nick Adams stories coherently benefits from material that fills substantial gaps in the narrative. Further, all this new fiction relates in one way or another to events in the author's life, in which his readers continue to be interested. Last and most important is the fact that these pieces throw new light on the work and personality of one of our foremost writers and genuinely increase our understanding of him. The typography suggests an oblique introduction, but a warm reception is expected.
-- PHILIP YOUNG
Preface copyright © 1972 by Charles Scribner's Sons
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B0032JQ78U
- Publisher : Scribner; Reissue edition (November 24, 2009)
- Publication date : November 24, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 392 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 274 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0684169401
- Best Sellers Rank: #406,270 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #258 in Classic Short Stories
- #482 in Classic American Fiction
- #1,097 in Classic Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899. His father was a doctor and he was the second of six children. Their home was at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb.
In 1917, Hemingway joined the Kansas City Star as a cub reporter. The following year, he volunteered as an ambulance driver on the Italian front, where he was badly wounded but decorated for his services. He returned to America in 1919, and married in 1921. In 1922, he reported on the Greco-Turkish war before resigning from journalism to devote himself to fiction. He settled in Paris where he renewed his earlier friendships with such fellow-American expatriates as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Their encouragement and criticism were to play a valuable part in the formation of his style.
Hemingway's first two published works were Three Stories and Ten Poems and In Our Time but it was the satirical novel, The Torrents of Spring, that established his name more widely. His international reputation was firmly secured by his next three books; Fiesta, Men Without Women and A Farewell to Arms.
He was passionately involved with bullfighting, big-game hunting and deep-sea fishing and his writing reflected this. He visited Spain during the Civil War and described his experiences in the bestseller, For Whom the Bell Tolls.
His direct and deceptively simple style of writing spawned generations of imitators but no equals. Recognition of his position in contemporary literature came in 1954 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
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It is a collection of short stories from earlier works of Hemingway. In each of them, a thoughtful reader can gain insight into Hemingway and him/herself.
The following is from "Indian Camp." In it, Nick is a very young boy, and, with his physician father, he has been present at a difficult childbirth and found the victim of a suicide. Dawn is approaching and he is in the canoe with his father rowing back across the lake.
Quote:
"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"
"Not very many, Nick."...
"Is dying hard, Daddy?"
"No, I think it's pretty easy Nick. It all depends."
They were seated in the boat, Nick in the stern, his father rowing. The sun was coming up over the hills. A bass jumped, making a circle in the water. Nick trailed his hand in the water. It felt warm in the sharp chill of the morning.
In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die.
Unquote
Regardless of how you feel about Hemingway, this is a poignant look into the soul of the man, and ourselves. Hemingway's family was plagued by suicide, including that of his physician father, and, like all of us, Hemingway was once a young child coming to grips with the idea of mortality, in a world still fresh and fascinating and frightening.
Other stories deal with the joys of a life full-lived, an appreciation of the natural world around us, and our "quiet desperation," in love, life, and death.
"The Nick Adams Stories" is high on my "Top Ten List."