Hemingway’s Formation of In Our Time

Folders 96 and 97A in the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library capture moments in Hemingway’s formation of In Our Time (1925). As of the materials in Folder 97A, written in summer or early fall of 1924, Hemingway planned to include “Up in Michigan” and “Summer People,” but he had not yet decided where to place “Big Two-Hearted River.” Probably written later, the notes in Folder 96 show Hemingway’s replacing “Summer People” with “The Three-Day Blow.” Both folders suggest that Hemingway was settled on the order of marriage tales and bullfighting chapters in the collection. Hemingway’s notes in these folders reflect his shaping and reshaping the order of the stories and chapters that formed the collage of In Our Time.