Indian Camp - Background and Publication History

Background and Publication History

In the early 1920s, Hemingway and his wife Hadley lived in Paris where he was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. When Hadley became pregnant they returned to Toronto. Hemingway biographer Kenneth Lynn suggests that Hadley's childbirth became the inspiration for the story. She went into labor while Hemingway was on a train, returning from New York. Lynn believes Hemingway likely was terrified Hadley would not survive the birth, and he became "beside himself with fear ... about the extent of her suffering and swamped by a sense of helplessness at the realization that he would probably arrive too late to be of assistance to her". Hemingway wrote "Indian Camp" a few months after John Hemingway was born in Toronto on October 10, 1923.

While they were in Toronto, Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, was published in Paris, followed months later by a second volume, in our time (without capitals), which included 18 short vignettes presented as untitled chapters. Hemingway, Hadley, and their son (nicknamed Bumby) returned to Paris in January 1924, moving into a new apartment on the Rue Notre Dame des Champs. With Ezra Pound, Hemingway helped Ford Madox Ford edit his newly launched literary magazine, Transatlantic Review, which published pieces by modernists such as Pound, John Dos Passos, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, as well as Hemingway.

"Indian Camp" began as a 29-page untitled manuscript that Hemingway cut to seven pages; at first he called the story "One Night Last Summer". In 1924, the seven-page story titled "Indian Camp" was published by the Transatlantic Review in the "Works in Progress" section, along with a piece from James Joyce's manuscript Finnegans Wake. A year later on October 5, 1925, "Indian Camp" was republished by Boni & Liveright in New York, in an expanded American edition of Hemingway's first collection of short stories titled In Our Time, (with capitals) with a print-run of 1335 copies.

"Indian Camp" was later included in Hemingway's collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories published in October 1938. Two collections of short stories published after Hemingway's death included "Indian Camp": The Nick Adams Stories (1972) and The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (1987). The Nick Adams Stories (1972), edited by Philip Young, included the story fragment titled "Three Shots" that Hemingway originally cut from "Indian Camp".