Indian Camp

TEXT ANALYSIS

  INDIAN CAMP

  Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
  Few writers have lived as colorfully as Ernest Hemingway, whose career could have come out of one his adventurous novels. Like Fitzgerald, Dreiser and many other fine novelists of the 20th century, Hemingway spent childhood vocations in Michigan on hunting and fishing trips.
  After his novel “The Sun Also Rises” (1926) brought him fame, he covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the fighting in China in the 1940s. On a safari in Africa he was badly injured when his small plane crashed; still he continued to enjoy hunting and sport fishing, activities that inspired some of his best works. “The Old Man And The Sea” (1952), a short poetic novel about a poor, old fisherman who heroically catches a huge fish devoured by sharks, won him the Nobel Prize. Discouraged by a troubled family background, illness and the belief that he was losing his gift for writing, Hemingway shot himself to death in !961.
  His hallmark is a clean style devoid of unnecessary words. Often he uses understatement: In “A Farewell to Arms” (1929) the heroine dies in childbirth saying “I am not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick.” He once compared his writing to icebergs: “There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.”
  His fine ear for dialogue and exact description shows in his excellent stories, such as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Critical opinion generally holds his short stories equal or superior to his novels. His best novels include “The Sun Also Rises”, about the demoralized life of expatriates after World War I; “A Farewell to Arms”, about the tragic love affair   of an American soldier and an English nurse during the war; “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), set during the Spanish Civil War; and “The Old Man And The Sea.”

  Indian Camp is one of Hemingway's early short stories. It was published together with thirteen others in his first...