In Our Time

First published in Paris in 1924, in our time is Ernest Hemingway’s stark, fragmentary portrait of a world marked by war, brutality and dislocation. Comprising eighteen brief prose vignettes, the collection moves between the battlefields of the First World War, the bullrings of Spain and scenes drawn from the darker corners of contemporary life. In a handful of precise, unsentimental strokes, Hemingway captures wounded soldiers, public executions and the casual violence that shadows ordinary existence. These miniature narratives offer no comforting explanations; instead, they leave the reader with images that linger long after their few lines have ended.

An essential early work, in our time reveals Hemingway developing the compressed style, emotional restraint and startling economy that would transform modern American fiction. Its fragments suggest a world whose violence cannot always be contained within conventional storytelling, anticipating the larger collection In Our Time published in 1925, which incorporated the vignettes alongside short stories including Indian Camp and Big Two-Hearted River. Shaped by Hemingway’s years as a journalist and his experiences of post-war Europe, the book belongs to the formative moment of literary modernism, when writers were searching for new ways to represent a fractured age. Small in scale but formidable in effect, it marks the emergence of a distinctive literary voice.

From the book

“Things were getting forward.”

— Ernest Hemingway, in our time

On in our time

“In the dry compressed little vignettes of In Our Time he has almost invented a form of his own.”

— Edmund Wilson, The Dial, 1924