Big Two-Hearted River - Background and Publication

Background and Publication

In 1922, Hemingway moved with his wife Hadley to Paris where he worked as foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. He became friends with and influenced by modernist writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. He was first published in 1923, with a slim volume titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, followed the next year by another collection of short vignettes, in our time (without capitals). Hoping to have in our time published in New York, in 1924 he began writing stories to add to the volume, with "Big Two-Hearted River" planned as the final piece. He started writing the story in May of that year but did not finish until September as he spent the summer helping Ezra Pound and Ford Madox Ford launch the journal the transatlantic review.

"Big Two-Hearted River" has strong autobiographical elements. Hemingway was a member of the Red Cross at 19, and was sent to the Italian Front at Fossalta as an ambulance driver. On his first day there he helped to retrieve the remains of female workers killed in a munitions factory explosion, about which he later wrote in Death in the Afternoon: "I remember that after we searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments". A few days later, on July 8, he was severely wounded when a mortar exploded between his legs. He was sent to a hospital in Milan where he recuperated for six months; after his return home to Michigan, in the summer of 1919, he took a fishing and camping trip with high school friends. In September he went on a second fishing trip, alone, in Michigan's back-country—a trip that became the inspiration for "Big Two-Hearted River". The manuscript shows the use of plural pronouns, suggesting that in an early version more characters were included, but by publication any mention of his high school friends or the townspeople had been removed—leaving Nick alone in the woods.

When asked her opinion of the draft in October, Stein advised Hemingway to cut an 11-page section of stream-of-consciousness reminiscences written from Nick's point of view. He took her advice, reworked the ending, and wrote to his editor, "I have discovered that the last eleven pages of the last story in the book are crap". Biographer James Mellow writes that at this early stage in his career, Hemingway had not developed his talent enough to fully and capably integrate self-reflections in his writing; Mellow also believes the deleted passage might have been a "tour-de-force" had it been written at a more mature period in Hemingway's development.

In January 1925, while wintering in Schruns, Austria, waiting for a response from America, Hemingway submitted the story to be published in his friend Bill Walsh's newly established literary magazine This Quarter. Walsh bought it for 1,000 French francs, the highest payment Hemingway had yet received for a piece of fiction. On October 5, 1925, the expanded edition of In Our Time (with conventional capitalization in the title) was published by Boni & Liveright in New York. The last story in the volume was the two-part "Big Two-Hearted River". The piece was later included in Hemingway's collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published in October 1938, and in two collections of short stories published after his death, The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987).