Big Two-Hearted River - Reception

Reception

In our time was published as part of Pound's modernist series by Three Mountains Press, Paris in 1924. The work was well received by critics; Edmund Wilson described the writing as "of the first distinction", and in the 1940s he again wrote of "Big Two-Hearted River", "along with the mottled trout ... the boy from the American Middle West fishes up a nice little masterpiece." When the story was published in the United States, critics asserted Hemingway had reinvigorated the short story by his use of declarative sentences and his crisp style. In 1952, reviewing The Old Man and the Sea—for which Hemingway would win the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize in Literature—The New York Times said of "Big Two-Hearted River" that it was one of the "best and happiest of his early short stories".

In the 1970s, Carlos Baker wrote that the stories of In Our Time were a remarkable achievement for a young writer, and in 2004, Joseph Flora said of the story that "it is unquestionably the most brilliant of the collection In Our Time". It has become one of Hemingway's most anthologized stories, and is one of a handful that has been a subject of literary criticism since its publication. It has become part of the 20th-century American literary canon, writes Beegel, and is considered "among the best" American short stories along with Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".

According to Benson, although Hemingway was influenced by Pound and Joyce, he "carried the new form into the position of dominant influence" for much of the 20th century. Unlike other modernist writers, who wrote of man cut off from the past, Hemingway placed his narratives in the present and hence he became "the true modernist".