Reception
"Cat in the Rain" was first published in New York in 1925, as a part of the short story collection In Our Time. In Our Time, which derives its title from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer ("Give us peace in our time, O Lord"), was Hemingway’s first published work. It contains notable short stories such as “The End of Something”, “Soldier's Home”, and "Big Two-Hearted River”.
When it was published, In Our Time received acclaim from many notable authors of the period, including "Ford Madox Ford, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald" who praised "its simple and precise use of language to convey a wide range of complex emotions, and it earned Hemingway a place beside Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein among the most promising American writers of that period." In a New York Times book review from October 1925, titled Preludes to a Mood, the reviewer praised Hemingway for his use of language, which he described as "fibrous and athletic, colloquial and fresh, hard and clean; his very prose seems to have an organic being of its own. Every syllable counts toward a stimulating, entrancing experience of magic." Author D.H. Lawrence, who is notable for his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, also reviewed In Our Time. Lawrence wrote that In Our Time was "a series of successive sketches from a man's life...a fragmentary novel...It is a short book: and it does not pretend to be about one man. But it is. It is as much as we need know of the man's life. The sketches are short, sharp, vivid, and most of them excellent." Another reviewer commented that Hemingway's writing illustrated that the author had "felt the genius of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and had obviously been influenced by it."
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