In our time

In Our Time, Ernest Hemingway's first American story collection, was published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright. It gathers fourteen short stories interwoven with eighteen brief vignettes carried over from his earlier Paris edition — terse sketches of war, bullfighting, and violence that comment on the stories around them rather than narrate directly.

Several of the stories follow Nick Adams from boyhood in northern Michigan through the aftermath of the First World War, tracing loss, alienation, and the difficulty of returning to ordinary life. Others, including "Cat in the Rain" and "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," turn to strained marriages and characters adrift in postwar Europe.

Written in Hemingway's spare, understated prose — the style he later called the theory of omission — In Our Time established the voice that would define his later novels and is regarded as a founding work of American literary modernism.