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Now I Lay Me (1927)

In this by Ernest Hemingway, Nick Adams spends a night lying on the floor of a silkworm house and reflecting on his life before his wartime injury.

(John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum) A few weeks after Ernest Hemingway began work as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy during the first World War, he volunteered for canteen service on the front lines, outside the town of Fossalta on the Piave River. The link between author and character in this story is reinforced, in the view of some scholars, by an early draft in which Nick’s mother refers to him as Ernie, which Hemingway crossed out and replaced with Nicky. As with other stories, it seems that the apparently autobiographical nature of “Now I Lay Me” has chilled any interest in its literary sources; and if so, there is an irony in the fact that so little of its narrative can be corroborated as personal history.

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