Vintage Hemingway

The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Philip Young (Scribners, 268 pp., $7.95)

This is an important book, but also an ambiguous one. Philip Young, one of our ablest critics and/or scholars where Hemingway is concerned, has had access to the unpublished manuscripts, and finding among them a good deal of early Hemingway material dealing with Nick Adams—the first and, in my opinion, the most important of the Hemingway protagonists—decided to bring together the published and the unpublished material in a single volume. What Young wants to construct, really, is a novel Hemingway never wrote, the development of Nick, from child dependent upon his father to adolescent experimenter with experience, soldier, writer and parent.

About the Author

Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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The Nick Adams Stories, by Ernest Hemingway, edited by Philip Young (Scribners, 268 pp., $7.95)

This is an important book, but also an ambiguous one. Philip Young, one of our ablest critics and/or scholars where Hemingway is concerned, has had access to the unpublished manuscripts, and finding among them a good deal of early Hemingway material dealing with Nick Adams—the first and, in my opinion, the most important of the Hemingway protagonists—decided to bring together the published and the unpublished material in a single volume. What Young wants to construct, really, is a novel Hemingway never wrote, the development of Nick, from child dependent upon his father to adolescent experimenter with experience, soldier, writer and parent.