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The Jungle Out There: Nick Adams Takes to the Road
- The Hemingway Review
- University of Idaho Department of English
- Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 2009
- pp. 61-72
- 10.1353/hem.0.0045
- Article
- Additional Information
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"The Battler" and "The Light of the World" can be viewed as contributions to hobo-tramp literature. Evoking the work in this vein of Jack London, W. H. Davies, Josiah Flynt, and Glenn H. Mullin, these hard-edged stories delineate late adolescent encounters—out-in-the-real-world experiences—that stand in stark contrast to those invented by Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise, a defining work of what Updike calls "collegiate romanticism," as well as those presented in Owen Johnson's high-jinks romps—The Prodigious Hickey (1908), The Varmint (1910), and The Tennessee Shad (1911)—the Lawrenceville prep-school stories so avidly read at the time.