Indian Camp

One of his several short stories set in Northern Michigan, “Indian Camp” by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was first published in a 1924 issue of the Parisian literary magazine Transatlantic Review. The next year, “Indian Camp” was included in Hemingway’s first story collection, In Our Time. “Indian Camp” has since become one of Hemingway’s most heavily anthologized works. Based partly on Hemingway’s visits to Petoskey, Michigan, during childhood and young adulthood, “Indian Camp” follows young Nick Adams as he accompanies his physician father on a medical errand.

In addition to introducing Nick Adams, the protagonist of more than 20 other early stories, “Indian Camp” features characteristics that now define Hemingway as an author, including his “iceberg theory” of writing and themes like humanity’s relationship to nature and performances of masculinity. His expansive oeuvre includes dozens of short stories and nine novels and novellas. Works like The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and A Farewell to Arms are widely taught and considered American classics. His 1952 novella, The Old Man and the Sea, earned him the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.

This guide refers to “Indian Camp” as included in In Our Time, the Scribner Paperback edition published in 2003.