In Our Time (book)

In Our Time (book)

In Our Time is the first collection of short stories written by Ernest Hemingway. It was published by Boni & Liveright in New York in 1925 after a shorter edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924. The 1924 Parisian edition, in our time, consisted of 32 pages and was published in a small edition of 170 copies and contained only the vignettes later used as interchapters for In Our Time, though some of these vignettes, like "A Very Short Story" and "The Revolutionist," were treated as full short stories in the later collection.

The 1925 volume contains several well-known Hemingway stories, including the Nick Adams stories "Indian Camp", "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife", "The Three-Day Blow", and "The Battler", and introduces readers to Hemingway's distinctive style. A subsequent edition, published in 1930, included "On the Quai at Smyrna". The title comes from the English Book of Common Prayer: "give us peace in our time, O Lord", suggested to Hemingway by Ezra Pound. At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a significant development in prose fiction, for its spare language and oblique depiction of the psychological states of the characters portrayed.