Soldier's Home

Ernest Hemingway in 1923

"Soldier's Home" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was included in the 1925 Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers and published by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's 1925 New York collection short stories, In Our Time.^[1]

Summary

The story is about Harold Krebs, a young soldier returning home to Oklahoma after seeing action in five of the bloodiest World War I battles: Battle of Belleau Wood, Soissons, Champagne, Battle of Saint-Mihiel and the Argonne. Krebs lives with his parents who treat him as they did before he left for war, unable to understand his post-war trauma and depression.

Style and themes

In the 1920s, Hemingway was inspired by Ezra Pound's writings and applied the poet's principles of imagism to his own early work.^[2] Hemingway's short stories from the 1920s adhere to Pound's tight definition of imagism;^[3] biographer Carlos Baker writes that in his short stories Hemingway tried to learn how to "get the most from the least, [to] prune language, [to] multiply intensities, [to] tell nothing but the truth in a way that allowed for telling more than the truth".^[4] Hemingway adapted this style into a technique he called his iceberg theory: as Baker describes it, the hard facts float above water while the supporting structure, including the symbolism, operates out of sight.^[4]

Kreb's reactions to his war experience, his depression, are not explicitly mentioned in the story, rather the number of battles he fought in are stated. His fundamentalist parents fail to understand the source of his misery, his mother asking him to kneel in prayer. The town's citizens are similarly unable to understand and are disinterested in returning servicemen, after having had parades for those who returned earlier. The reader infers from these situations Kreb's state of distress. In the end, he thinks he will leave for Kansas City to find a job.^[1]

References

1 2 Oliver, (1999), 308
↑ Meyers (1985), 74, 126
↑ Benson (1975), 285–287
1 2 Baker (1972), 117

Sources

Baker, Carlos (1981). Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 978-0-684-16765-7
Benson, Jackson (1975). "Ernest Hemingway as Short Story Writer". in Benson, Jackson (ed). The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: Critical Essays. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-0320-6
Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. New York: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-333-42126-0
Oliver, Charles (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8160-3467-3

External links

Ernest Hemingway Collection, JFK Library

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Non-fiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

Short stories

"Indian Camp" (1925)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1926)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Story fragments

"On Writing"

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Letters and
journalism

Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet

"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story

A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series

To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)

For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1965 TV series Metallica song

The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 miniseries 1999 film

Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977)