Hemingway's Earliest Heroes Nick Adams and Jake Barnes

Nick Adams is Ernest Hemingway's most important and best-liked character. Nick is, in many ways, Hemingway himself, his alter ego: his remembered or imagined self in the earlier stories and his projected better self in many of the later ones. Once Ernest Hemingway created the character of Nick Adams in "Indian Camp," he couldn't let go. More than a dozen remarkable stories chart Nick's growth from childhood through adolescence to early and mature manhood.

Like Nick Adams, Jake Barnes of The Sun Also Rises is a Hemingway surrogate, an American soldier injured on the Italian front who falls hopelessly in love with his hospital nurse. Like Nick, Jake is a reader, writer, traveler, and outdoorsman who confronts an often enigmatic and inhospitable world with intelligence, courage, and grace under pressure.