is somebody; a new honest un-'literary' transcriber of life – a Writer." Reviewing if for The Bookman, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway was an "augury" of the age and that the Nick Adams stories were "temperamentally new" in American fiction. His parents, however, described the book as "filth", disturbed by the passage in "A Very Short Story" which tells of a soldier contracting gonorrhea after a sexual encounter with a sales girl in a taxicab. Bird sent five copies to them which were promptly returned, eliciting a letter from Hemingway, who complained, "I wonder what was the matter, whether the pictures were too accurate and the attitude toward life not sufficiently distorted to please who ever bought the book or what?" In Our Time was ignored and forgotten by literary critics for decades. Benson attributes the neglect to various factors. The Sun Also Rises, published the next year, is considered the more important book followed fairly rapidly by the popular A Farewell to Arms two years after in 1928; critics' general assumption seemed to be that Hemingway's talent lay in writing prose rather than "sophisticated, complex design"; and In Our Time stories were combined with subsequent collections in the publication of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories in 1938, drawing the critics' attention away from the book as an entity, toward the individual stories. In 1962, when Scribner's released the paperback edition of In Our Time, it began to be taught in American universities, and by the end of the decade, the first critical study of the collection appeared. Benson describes the collection as the author's first "major achievement"; Wagner-Martin as "his most striking work, both in terms of personal involvement and technical innovation." References Sources Baker, Carlos. (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist. (4th edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Barloon, Jim. (2005). "Very Short Stories: The Miniaturization of War in Hemingway's 'In Our Time'". The Hemingway Review. Vol. 24, No. 2. Benson, Jackson. (1983). "Patterns of Connections and their development in Hemingway's In Our Time". In Reynolds, Michael. (ed). Critical essays on Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. Boston: G. K. Hall. 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. Bickford, Sylvester. (1992). "Hemingway's Italian Waste Land: The Complex Unity of 'Out of Season'". In Beegel, Susan F. (ed). Hemingway's