In Another Country

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) wrote fictional works that included realities from his life. Events in his stories may be made up, but he was always familiar with the situations and settings in which his characters lived. Hemingway grew up in the sheltered American heartland. He wrote short stories and articles for his high school newspaper and graduated in 1917, just two months after America entered World War I.

He had already decided to become a writer and believed a job as a journalist would be more valuable than going to college. By October, he was working as a cub reporter at the highly respected Kansas City Star. Reporters there were taught to write in the clean, crisp, no-nonsense style that became characteristic of his later writing.

Even though Hemingway was too young to join the army, he was determined to experience the war. He found an opening to volunteer as an ambulance driver with the Red Cross in Italy, and he reported for duty in Milan in the spring of 1918. Two weeks before turning 19 in July, he was passing out candy bars to soldiers at the front when he was hit with metal fragments from a mortar shell. Then, while trying to help other wounded men take cover, he was hit by machine gun fire. With over 200 metal fragments inside of him, he was transported to Milan’s Red Cross hospital.

By September, after several operations, he was able to walk across town on crutches to the Main Hospital for therapeutic rehabilitation exercise, just like the soldiers in his story. Three months later, he limped down the gangplank of a ship returning to New York and had the good fortune to be interviewed dockside by a reporter from the New York Sun. He was written up as a war hero. He would build his warrior reputation for the rest of his career.

Back at home in the Midwest, Hemingway continued recovering and writing short stories based on his early life and war experience, although he was not yet able to get them published. In early 1920, he moved to Canada and, to make money, began contributing news stories to the Toronto Star newspaper. Later that summer, he was in Chicago continuing his journalism and met his future wife, Hadley Richardson. They were married in September 1921.

Hemingway was not making much money, but Hadley had a small income from a family trust, and the two dreamed of moving to Europe. They had become friendly with the established writer Sherwood Anderson, and he suggested that they should move to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which was then crowded with the writers and artists who were shaping the most exciting literature and painting of the time. Anderson wrote letters of introduction for them to the most well-connected expatriates in Paris, such as Gertrude Stein, who hosted gatherings with famous writers and artists (including Picasso), and Sylvia Beach, who ran a bookstore and was working with James Joyce to publish Ulysses.

By January 1922, they had moved to Paris and were warmly welcomed by the artistic community. Their happy times are the focus of Hemingway’s later memoir, A Moveable Feast. By the fall of 1926, however, Hemingway had an affair and fell in love with Pauline Pfeiffer, who would become his second wife. He was grieving the breakup with Hadley, but he kept busy by making final edits to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which became a critical success and is often named among the greatest novels of the 20th century. At exactly this time, he began working on his short story “In Another Country.”

Hemingway’s first draft of “In Another Country” has survived among his papers now collected at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. The September version had little dialogue and focused on war and the injured soldiers. However, the final draft sent to his publisher in November added the closing conversation with the older officer—with its forceful statement that a man should avoid marriage because losing it can be too painful.