Portal:Novels/Selected article/18

"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway (pictured). The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in 1925 in the American edition of Hemingway's first volume of short stories In Our Time. The first of Hemingway's stories to feature the semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—"Indian Camp" is told from his point-of-view. In the story, Nick Adams' father, a country doctor, has been summoned to an Indian camp to deliver a baby. At the camp, the father is forced to perform an emergency caesarean section using a jack-knife, with Nick as his assistant. Afterward, the woman's husband is discovered dead, having fatally slit his throat during the operation. The story is important because it shows the emergence of Hemingway's understated style and use of counterpoint. An initiation story, "Indian Camp" includes themes such as childbirth and fear of death, which permeate much of Hemingway's subsequent work. When the story was published, the quality of writing was noted and praised; scholars consider "Indian Camp" an important story in the Hemingway canon.