Morganmobile: It's About Time
Most of Ernest Hemingway’s early fiction manuscripts were stolen from a Paris train station in 1922. Ezra Pound responded to the news by remarking that the only thing Hemingway had really lost was the time it would take to rewrite the parts he could remember. If he failed to recapture stories he had created—if their forms “wobbled”—then they were never viable anyway. Whether the vignettes in Hemingway’s first published collection, in our time, reflect fresh starts or attempts at recreating his past efforts is unknown. The book’s title, deliberately set in lower case, suggests Hemingway's conviction that it was his time, dominated by the Great War, that had shaped both his experience and the language he needed to translate it into art.
Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), in our time, Paris, Three Mountains Press, 1924. The Carter Burden Collection of American Literature. PML 185659.