Milton A. Cohen

In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published a small book of eighteen vignettes, each little more than one page long, with a small press in Paris. Titled in our time, the volume was later absorbed into Hemingway’s story collection In Our Time. Those vignettes, as Milton Cohen demonstrates in Hemingway’s Laboratory, reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s. Further, they provide a vivid view of his earliest tendencies and influences, first manifestations of the style that would become his hallmark, and daring departures into narrative forms that he would forever leave behind.

Different as they were as poets, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Williams Carlos Williams grappled with the highly charged literary politics of the 1930s in comparable ways.  All four poets saw their reputations critically challenged in these years and felt compelled to respond to the new politics, literary and national, in distinct ways, ranging from rejection to involvement.  Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics closely examines the dynamics of their responses.