Many of the short stories we read in high school and college are the product of a young Ernest Hemingway. His first collection of stories was published in the States as In Our Time in 1925 when he was just 26 years old. An earlier, far slimmer volume called in our time was published in Paris the year before. The stories contained in In Our Time are separated by short, fairly violent vignettes about World War I and bullfighting that don't tend to make it into the anthologies as much. The short stories in the book are

On the Quai at Smyrna
Indian Camp
The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
The End of Something
The Three-Day Blow
The Battler
A Very Short Story
Soldier's Home
The Revolutionist
Mr. And Mrs. Elliot
Cat in the Rain
Out of Season
Cross-Country Snow
My Old Man
Big Two-Hearted River (in 2 parts)

I remember reading most of these in school. They seemed boring to me as a teen and I'm not sure most high school students are really the right audience for these. They examine themes that most people under age twenty just don't deal with. We read these deceptively simple stories about facing the end of the carefree chapter of life while most of us are generally only thinking about how youth will never end and about what that boy/girl across the room thinks of us. We're not ready for these subtle studies on complex relationships.

Many of the stories in In Our Time are Nick Adams stories, which, read in order, tell a definite story that reflects many of Hemingway's own feelings at the time as he dealt with the reality that he was to be a father. The Nick Adams stories express dismay at (or at least disappointment with) the thought of being tied down, physically and creatively, to a wife and baby, mingled with moments of hope that things could be not quite as bad as feared. Nick hops a train to escape his reality and goes fishing instead, an activity he knows by rote and which gives him palpable satisfaction. In the real world parallel to the Nick Adams stories, Hemingway divorced his first wife Hadley in 1927 when their son was four years old. The Nick Adams stories romanticize Hemingway's time in Northern Michigan, before responsibility, before "consequences."

In college especially it was drilled into my head (though the idea never took hold) that when you read a story you read it independent of the author. You are free to interpret it as you wish, using a variety of frameworks that guide interpretation, as long as you don't look too closely at what the author "intended" to say. This always irked me. As someone who writes, I believe that everything an author writes contains clues to his or her life and thoughts. With no author is this more obvious than Hemingway.

Now halfway through the substantial biography Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences, I'm more convinced of this than ever. Hemingway wrote his early stories and his first major novel, The Sun Also Rises, with real names of real people that he changed (or, on a couple occasions didn't change) during rewrites. Even then his friends and enemies recognized themselves in the pages, as Hemingway often recorded actual incidents and conversations, which were rarely flattering, more as a reporter would than a novelist. This makes a lot of sense when you realize that he was a reporter at the time. Don't tell me the author doesn't matter. The issues he wrestles with in In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are issues he actually wrestled with in real life. Parental relationships, regret over broken relationships with friends and a first love, fear about being tied down, estrangement from his wife, mixed feelings about raising children.

And how can it be otherwise? I suppose a writer just writing stories to ride waves of trends and sell lots of books might lack sincerity and authenticity in his/her writing, but a writer of literature that lasts is usually exploring big issues that not only affect everyone (hence the longevity of these great books) but also have affected his/her own life. Literature that lasts is real, first and foremost.

I think of all the stories in In Our Time, "My Old Man" and "Big Two-Hearted River" stick with me the most. They are on the longer side and highlight Hemingway's ability to describe the complex social interactions that go on between people and also those complicated interior moments that make up the majority of our lives. They show his talent for painting a very specific picture of a specific place. They cover places that figured prominently in his young life, Northern Michigan and Italy/Paris. They address loss of faith in people and loving someone even after you realize they are not quite who you thought they were. And they show the author's deep love and longing for a part of life that was gone forever. They allow people to be flawed, deeply, as we all really are. They mourn.