4 Monthly Sessions Thursdays, 6:00 pm EDT - 7:30 pm EDT June 30 to September 22, 2022
Online via Zoom
The ‘With Book’ option includes a copy of Library of America’s Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings, 1918-1926 at a 10% discount.
Meeting Dates:
Thursdays, 6/30, 7/28, 8/25, 9/22
6-7:30pm ET via Zoom
Presented in Partnership with Library of America
Ernest Hemingway is a writer too often more well-known for the life he led than for the works he wrote. The image of Hemingway merely as a heavy drinking hunter and fisherman too often obscures the complexity and innovativeness of his writing which revolutionized American fiction. Led by the editor of Library of America’s Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings, 1918-1926, Robert Trogdon, this group will cover the early works in which he perfected his style and technique: the short story collection In Our Time (1925) and the novel The Sun Also Rises (1925). In these books, Hemingway was able to adapt the lessons he learned from Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and other writers who were part of the Paris expatriate literary community for mainstream readers in the United States. In them, he was able to transmute his biography into fiction that was both popular and critically successful.
In Our Time contains some of Hemingway’s best-known short stories, including “Indian Camp,” “The End of Something,” “Soldier’s Home,” and “Big Two-Hearted River.” Many are based on his boyhood in Northern Michigan and feature Nick Adams, his fictional avatar. The Sun Also Rises is a roman a clef based on Hemingway and his associates during the summer of 1925 in France and Spain. It named and defined the “Lost Generation” that came of age during the First World War.
- Session I: In Our Time—“On the Quai at Smyrna” to “The Revolutionist”
- Session II: In Our Time—“Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” to “L’Evnoi”
- Session III: The Sun Also Rises, Chapters One to Nine
- Session IV: The Sun Also Rises, Chapters Ten to Nineteen

Led by
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Robert W. Trogdon
Robert W. Trogdon
Robert W. Trogdon is Professor of English at Kent State University. He is the author of The Lousy Racket: Hemingway, Scribners and the Business of Literature. He is editor of the Library of America’s Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings, 1918-1926 (2020) and the forthcoming Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms, Men Without Women, and Death in the Afternoon. He is co-volume editor for the first three volumes of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway and now serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for that edition.
About this series
Reading Groups
Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.