Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time helped to create the idiom of modernist literature, which would go on to become the predominant literary aesthetic of the 20th century. Emerging from the world of the Parisian little magazines, Hemingway brought the literary avant-garde to mass popular audiences. In the process he defined an enduring cultural style and shaped our understanding of World War I as well as the modern world it seemed to epitomize. Examining Hemingway’s artistic influences and the historical context of In Our Time, we will try to understand why this slim volume turned out to have such a large impact.
