In Our Time (book) - Background

Background

Soon after their marriage in September 1921, Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson moved from Illinois to Paris, following Sherwood Anderson's advice that the city was inexpensive and a good place for a young writer to live. There Hemingway met Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. He worked for the The Toronto Star as an international correspondent, and traveled around Europe reporting on the Greco-Turkish War and sporting events in Spain and Germany. He continued to write fiction and a few pieces of juvenilia he brought to Paris such as "Up in Michigan", a story Gertrude Stein judged unfit for publication.

All of his writing was lost in 1922 when a suitcase packed by Hadley containing his manuscripts and their duplicates was stolen from the Gare de Lyons and never recovered. Hemingway was furious and distraught, but Pound told him he had only lost the time it would take to rewrite the pieces. Hemingway either took Pound's advice and rewrote the lost pieces, or he wrote new work; by the end of 1923 he had the 18 sketches that became in our time.

The piece became a work that grew, keeping the same title, as sections were published in 1923, 1924 and 1925. In April 1923 six vignettes, none over 200 words, appeared in the April edition of The Little Review under the title "In Our Time". These were later published with 12 others in the Paris edition of in our time, and as "interchapters" in the 1925 American edition. Late in 1924 he had finished the stories that were published in the American edition of In Our Time, saying of his work, "I've worked like hell most of the time and think the stuff gets better."