"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time (1925). The first of Hemingway's stories to feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—"Indian Camp" is told from his point of view.
In the story Nick Adams' father, a country doctor, has been summoned to a Native American or "Indian" camp to deliver a pregnant woman of her baby. At the camp, the father is forced to perform an emergency caesarean section using a jack-knife, with Nick as his assistant. Afterward, the woman's husband is discovered dead, having slit his throat during the operation. The story shows the emergence of Hemingway's understated style and his use of counterpoint. An initiation story, "Indian Camp" includes themes such as childbirth and fear of death which permeate much of Hemingway's subsequent work. When the story was published, the quality of writing was noted and praised, and scholars consider "Indian Camp" an important story in the Hemingway canon.
Read more about Indian Camp: Plot Summary, Background and Publication History, Writing Style, Reception and Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words indian camp, indian and/or camp:
“This Indian camp was a slight, patched-up affair, which had stood there several weeks, built shed-fashion, open to the fire on the west.... Altogether it was about as savage a sight as was ever witnessed, and I was carried back at once three hundred years.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“But we, in anchor-watches calm,
The Indian Psyche’s languor won,
And, musing, breathed primeval balm
From Edens ere yet over-run;
Marvelling mild if mortal twice,
Here and hereafter, touch a Paradise.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“When the weather is bad as it was yesterday, everybody, almost everybody, feels cross and gloomy. Our thin linen tents—about like a fish seine, the deep mud, the irregular mails, the never to-be-seen paymasters, and “the rest of mankind,” are growled about in “old-soldier” style. But a fine day like today has turned out brightens and cheers us all. We people in camp are merely big children, wayward and changeable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)