In the attempt to get at the "truth" of real-life experience and to attain the ideal of writing a "classic" that he initially posed for himself, Hemingway began in his early volumes of short stories to describe the adventures of a boy on the threshold of manhood. As Philip Young and Carlos Baker have pointed out in their studies, half of the stories of In Our Time (1925), the first short story collection, are devoted to the development of Nick Adams. They are arranged chronologically, moving from Nick's boyhood to his young manhood, and all of these stories are thematically related. Several more stories about the same character appear in the next two collections, Men Without Women (1927) and Winner Take Nothing (1933). Of importance to the whole of Hemingway's fiction is this early focus on a young hero, for if Philip Young is correct, this hero is to become the...