Nick Adams is a fictional character, the protagonist

Protagonist

A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

 of two dozen short stories by American author Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

, written in the 1920s and 30s. Adams is partly inspired by Hemingway's own experiences, from his summers in Northern Michigan

Michigan

Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....

 to his service in the Red Cross ambulance corps in World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

.

Most of these stories were collected in a 1972 book titled The Nick Adams Stories. They are, for the most part, stories of initiation and adolescence

Adolescence

Adolescence is a transitional stage of physical and mental human development generally occurring between puberty and legal adulthood , but largely characterized as beginning and ending with the teenage stage...

. Taken as a whole, as in The Nick Adams Stories, they chronicle a young man's coming of age

Coming of age

Coming of age is a young person's transition from childhood to adulthood. The age at which this transition takes place varies in society, as does the nature of the transition. It can be a simple legal convention or can be part of a ritual, as practiced by many societies...

 in a series of linked episodes. The stories are grouped according to major time periods in Nick's life.

Nick Adams Stories

• "Three Shots"
• "Indian Camp
  Indian Camp
  "Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in the American edition of Hemingway's first volume of short stories In Our Time...
  
  "
• "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
  The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife
  "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway published in his 1925 volume of short stories In Our Time.In the story a doctor hires a three Native Americans to clean up some logs on his property, and one of the workers casually asks him where he stole them from. The doctor...
  
  "
• "Ten Indians"
• "The Indians Moved Away"
• "The Light of the World"
• "The Battler
  The Battler
  "The Battler" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. It was included in the collection In Our Time .In the story, Nick Adams is thrown from a train and finds temporary shelter at a campfire. There, he meets an ex-boxer named Ad Francis. Francis takes an immediate liking to Adams, who he...
  
  "
• "The Killers
  The Killers (short story)
  '"The Killers"' is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It first appeared to the public in 1927 in Scribner's Magazine. How much Hemingway received for the literary piece is unknown, but some sources state it was $200. Historians have some documents showing that the working title of the piece was...
  
  "
• "The Last Good Country"
• "Crossing the Mississippi"
• "Night Before Landing"
• "'Nick sat against the wall ...'"
• "Now I Lay Me
  Now I Lay Me
  "Now I Lay Me" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway.The story is about Nick Adams, one of Hemingway's recurring characters, forcing himself to stay awake at night in an army tent during World War I. He is afraid that if he goes to sleep in the dark his soul will escape him. Nick is...
  
  "

• "A Way You'll Never Be
  A Way You'll Never Be
  "A Way You'll Never Be" is a 1933 short story by Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner in the short story collection Winner Take Nothing. It features the character Nick Adams as he recovers from a traumatic head wound....
  
  "
• "In Another Country
  In Another Country
  "In Another Country" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway.It is about an ambulance corps member in Milan during World War I. Although unnamed, he is assumed to be "Nick" a character Hemingway made to represent himself. He has an injured knee and visits a hospital daily for...
  
  "
• "Big Two-Hearted River
  Big Two-Hearted River
  "Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway published in 1925 in his first collection of stories, In Our Time. The story is generally viewed as an account of a healing process for Hemingway's autobiographical character Nick Adams, recently returned...
  
  "
• "The End of Something
  The End of Something
  "The End of Something" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway published in 1925 in his collection of short stories In Our Time.-Publication History:According to notes on the manuscript, Hemingway wrote “The End of Something” in March 1924...
  
  "
• "The Three-Day Blow
  The Three-Day Blow
  “The Three-Day Blow” is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, first published in his collection In Our Time in 1925. The story features Nick Adams, one of Hemingway’s recurring protagonists, appearing in at least a dozen of Hemingway’s stories written during the 20s and 30s...
  
  "
• "Summer People"
• "Wedding Day"
• "On Writing"
• "An Alpine Idyll"
• "Cross-Country Snow"
• "Fathers and Sons
  Fathers and Sons (short story)
  "Fathers and Sons" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway published 1933, in the collection Winner Take Nothing. It later appeared in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories and The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories...
  
  "

External links and references

• The New York Times review of The Nick Adams Stories
• The Great Michigan Read, a statewide reading program featuring The Nick Adams Stories