Indian Camp

One of the High Modernists, Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. “Indian Camp” draws on Hemingway’s childhood experiences visiting Northern Michigan. Hemingway’s father was also a physician, which might have informed some of the story’s medical details. Throughout his life, Hemingway worked as a reporter, covering several wars, including the Spanish Civil War. He was one of many expatriate artists living in Paris, and he later lived in Cuba, Florida, and Idaho.

A leader in the Modernist movement, Hemingway collaborated with writers such as Ford Madox Ford (who first published “Indian Camp” in his literary magazine), Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a Modernist, Hemingway broke stylistic conventions and experimented with language. He is most well-known for his signature writing style, which consists of short, direct sentences and straightforward dialogue. This led to his “iceberg theory” of writing, alluding to the fact that only a small portion of an iceberg is visible above water, its great mass concealed beneath the surface. As he explained in Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway believed that a writer who “knows enough of what he is writing about” can “omit things that he knows” and yet, the reader will “have a feeling of those things as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, Ernest.