Nick Adams (character)

Nick Adams (character)

Nick Adams is a fictional character, the protagonist of two dozen short stories written in the 1920s and 30s by American author Ernest Hemingway. Adams is partly inspired by Hemingway's own experiences, from his summers in Northern Michigan to his service in the Red Cross ambulance corps in World War I. The first of Hemingway's stories to feature Nick Adams were published in his 1925 collection In Our Time, with Adams appearing as a young child in the collection's first story, "Indian Camp".

Most of these stories were later collected in a 1972 book, published after Hemingway's death, titled The Nick Adams Stories. They are, for the most part, stories of initiation and adolescence. Taken as a whole, as in The Nick Adams Stories, they chronicle a young man's coming of age in a series of linked episodes. The stories are grouped according to major time periods in Nick's life.