"Of the place where he had been a boy he had written well enough. As well as he could then." So thought a dying writer in an early version of "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." The writer of course was Ernest Hemingway. The place was the Michigan of his boyhood summers, where he remembered himself as Nick Adams. The now-famous "Nick Adams" stories show a memorable character growing from child to adolescent to soldier, veteran, writer, and parent -- a sequence closely paralleling the events of Hemingway's life.

In this arrangement Nick Adams emerges clearly as the first in a long line of Hemingway's fictional selves. Later versions were all to have behind them part of Nick's history and, correspondingly, part of Hemingway's. This is a must-have for fans of the iconic author.