Very probably [Hemingway] intended [the title of In Our Time] as
a sardonic allusion to a well-known phrase from the Church of
England's Book of Common Prayer: "Give peace in our time, O
Lord." At any rate the most striking thing about the volume is
that there is no peace at all in the stories. The next most
striking thing about them … is that half of the stories are
devoted to the spotty but careful development of a crucial but
long-ignored character—a boy, then a young man—named Nick Adams.
These stories are arranged in the chronological order of... (The
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