If you were not there at the time, Hemingway insisted, you could not possibly understand how things happened. He might have added that if you were there, you might be equally confused but in a different way. Of all the books in the Hemingway canon, none is more confusing than In Our Time, confusing now and then, confusing to reader and author, and particularly confusing to its bibliographers. It will remain that way forever, for its several parts – biographical, literary, editorial, and bibliographical – contain so many contradictions that any analysis will be flawed. Perhaps it is better that way, for so long as enigmas remain, the book lives; despite our proclaimed rage for order, there remains something about confusion that particularly delights us. Today the book and its attendant bibliography are a tangled ball of yarn. No matter which piece one selects to unravel first, the reader finds it snarled with another, and the unraveling becomes merely a rearrangement of the tangle.

As an entry point, we might note that Hemingway published three volumes of short stories: In Our Time (1925), Men Without Women (1927), and Winner Take Nothing (1933). Although all three titles imply a governing concept, only In Our Time has provoked numerous and divergent readings as a crafted sequence of stories with a sum larger than its parts. Neither the second nor the third volume evolved quite as complexly as did In Our Time, nor did Hemingway make any organizational claims for either of these volumes as he did for his first collection.