The Nick Adams Stories

The Nick Adams Stories is a compilation of short stories written by Ernest Hemingway. Published in 1972, over ten years after Hemingway's death, the book collects twenty-four stories featuring the protagonist Nick Adams. A young serviceman in the Red Cross ambulance corps during World War I, Nick Adams is in large part inspired by Hemingway's own experiences, both as a soldier and as a boy growing up in Northern Michigan. The stories are divided into five sections, each one representing a different formative period of Adams' life.

The first section is titled "Northern Woods" and largely covers stories from Nick's childhood years growing up in Michigan. The first story, "Three Shots," takes place on a camping trip Nick takes with his uncle and father. When his uncle and father go hunting and leave Nick at the camp, Nick gets frightened and shoots three shots into the air. Though Nick tells his father he took the shots because he thought he saw an animal, he is too ashamed to admit the real reason: a profoundly felt fear of dying alone.

The second story, "Indian Woods," details a profoundly traumatic incident witnessed by Nick while accompanying his father to a nearby Indian reservation. While his father, a doctor, attempts to deliver a breech baby from a woman who's been in labor for days, her husband slits his own throat from ear to ear.



The third story, "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," details a dispute between Nick's father and a Native American man he hired to remove some logs that had washed up on the Adams' lakefront beach. Humiliated and insulted by the hired man, the father goes home to retrieve his shotgun. But after a conversation with his gentle Christian scientist of a wife, the father decides to go squirrel hunting with his son instead.

In the fourth story, "Ten Indians," Nick and a group of boys pass by nine drunken Indians on their way back from a Fourth of July celebration. The boys accuse Nick of having a crush on an Indian girl named Prudence Mitchell, and while Nick denies it, later on he cries when he discovers that Prudence has been spending time with another boy.

In "The Indians Moved Away," the author continues his negative stereotyping of contemporary Indians, labeling them as lazy drunkards who, after squandering and spoiling the land of their ancestors, left the Petoskey, Michigan area for good.



In the next section, titled "On His Own," Nick is now seventeen and managing his transition into adulthood while living in the vicinity of Chicago, Illinois. The first story, "The Light of the World," details a night of debauchery in which Nick and his friends converse with a group of prostitutes who claim to have had relations with a famous murdered boxer named Steve Ketchel.

In the second story, "The Battler," a train-hopping Nick encounters a disgraced former prizefighter named Ad Francis who has lost his mind. Following a misunderstanding, Nick is nearly attacked by Ad before being saved by an African-American named Bugs who relates Ad's tale of woe to Nick.

In "The Killers," Nick tries to warn a Swedish boxer named Ole Andreson that two hitmen have arrived in town to kill him. Rather than express alarm, Andreson seems resigned to his fate.



In "The Last Good Country," Nick and his sister Littless attempt to evade two wardens trying to take Nick to a boarding school.

In "Crossing the Mississippi," Nick rides a train to Mississippi, thinking about the World Series between the Yankees and the White Sox before becoming enrapt by imagery associated with Mark Twain, whose characters often traveled along the Mississippi River.

The next section, titled "War," begins with "Night Before Landing." Nick is now a young soldier headed to his first combat zone on a warship. Though apprehensive about fighting in a war, Nick rethinks his cowardice after seeing Carper, a portly alcoholic who has ruined his military career because his fear leads him to drink.



In the next story, which is untitled, Nick is wounded. But rather than feeling scared like in the previous story, Nick feels a sense of calm at having achieved what he calls a "separate peace" with a fellow soldier named Rinaldi who has been injured as well.

Hemingway continues probing the evolution of a soldier's psyche in "Now I Lay Me," in which Nick, possibly suffering from PTSD, refuses to fall asleep during the nighttime for fear of losing his soul.

In "A Way You'll Never Be," Nick is still recovering from his war injury and still plagued by nightmares. Though fellow officers and soldiers are empathetic toward his plight, Nick rejects their empathy because he doesn't want to be pitied or seen as "nutty."



The next story, "In Another Country," details Nick's interactions with other wounded soldiers, particularly a major who is far more grievously wounded than Nick. This puts Nick's own physical and emotional trauma in perspective for him.

The fourth section, "A Soldier Home," details Nick's return to the United States following his military service. In "Big Two-Hearted River," Nick finds a sense of peace and calm while on a solitary fishing trip in Northern Michigan, allowing him a much-needed respite from the horrors of war.

The next story, "The End of Something," details a breakup between Nick and a young woman named Marjorie, precipitated by Nick's conclusion that it "isn't fun anymore." Though the phrase refers most explicitly to their relationship, it could also be construed to describe Nick's feelings toward life after witnessing the horrors of war, or the economic situation in Northern Michigan where much of the logging industry has departed.



In "The Three-Day Blow," Nick deals with the fallout of his breakup by getting drunk with his friend Bill. In the end, Nick concludes he may still be able to save the relationship.

In "Summer People," Nick now directs his attention toward a young woman named Kate. Kate, however, is already in a relationship with a detestable man named Ogdar.
The fifth and final section, "Company of Two," begins with "Wedding Day," which depicts everything about the day in question except the wedding itself, including Nick's pre-ceremony drinks with his friends and his post-ceremony sojourn to a lake cottage with his new wife.

The next story, "On Writing," is in fact a deleted ending to "Big Two-Hearted River." Here, Nick muses on his prospects and hopes as a writer, seeking to reconcile his identity as a fisherman and his identity as a more sensitive writer. In the end, Nick releases the trout he caught.



The next story, "An Alpine Idyll," details a grotesque story Nick hears while on a skiing trip in which a peasant, unable to pay for his dead wife's funeral, keeps her body in his work shed. After days of using his wife's body to hang his lantern while he works, the peasant ends up disfiguring his dead wife's face.

In "Cross Country Snow," Nick laments that he will have to give up his ski trips once his child is born.

The final story of both the section and the book is "Fathers and Sons." It brings the story collection full circle as Nick recalls memories of hunting trips with his father while going on a hunting trip of his own with his young son.



The Nick Adams Stories is both a showcase of Hemingway's talents as a young writer and also a fascinating look at Hemingway's own psyche during his formative years.