in our time

About this book

This slim book, printed in Paris in 1924 in an edition of only 170 copies, contains eighteen very short prose sketches, some only a paragraph long, written in a bare, exact style: six Greek cabinet ministers shot against a hospital wall at dawn, a bullfighter dying in the ring, refugees on a muddy road in a Greek retreat, soldiers shooting Germans as they climb a garden wall in the First World War, and a hanging in a Chicago jail.

Context and significance

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) was then an unknown young American journalist in Paris, and the book was edited by Ezra Pound for the small Three Mountains Press, with a portrait of the author by Henry Strater. In 1925 he placed these sketches between the stories of his first American collection, In Our Time. They are the laboratory of the style that later won him the Nobel Prize. Read The Sun Also Rises.

About the author