Big Two-Hearted River

Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” was first published in May 1925—when Hemingway was just 26 years old—in the inaugural issue of This Quarter, a Paris literary journal. In October of that year, he republished it as the foundational story in the 1925 edition of his collection of stories and vignettes In Our Time.­­ It was Hemingway’s first story to receive wide praise.

Written in direct and unadorned prose, the story describes Nick Adams’s journey from the town’s train station through the countryside to a campsite he makes near the river. The story contains very little dialogue and is told from Nick’s third-person part-tense limited point of view.

The story is divided into two parts. The first part begins with Nick Adams, the sole character in the story, sitting on a bundle of canvas and bedding that the baggage man has thrown onto the side of the tracks. The train Nick has just descended from passing “out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber” (Paragraph 1). Nick has plans to spend time alone, fishing and camping in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He is surprised to find nothing but burned over land where the logging town of Seney once was. Nick picks up his pack and fishing rod and then walks down the railroad track and onto a bridge that crosses the river. He looks down at the trout “keeping themselves steady” swimming in the current (Paragraph 2). Looking up, he notices a kingfisher flying and a big trout shooting upstream, then catching the sun as it jumps out of the water.

Nick continues to walk along the railroad track up the hill and, reaching the summit, sits against a charred stump and smokes a cigarette. Nick looks over the country and then notices a grasshopper climb on his woolen sock. He notes that all the grasshoppers he has encountered were black from living on the charred earth. Nick picks it carefully off his sock and says, “Go on, hopper,” as he tosses the grasshopper into the air: “Fly away somewhere” (Paragraph 14). The narrator notes that these are the first words Nick has uttered out loud.

Knowing the lay of the land, Nick does not need a map as he continues walking toward “an island of pine trees” in the distance (Paragraph 19). When he reaches the pines, Nick takes off his backpack and lies down. He closes his eyes and naps. When he wakes up, he is stiff and the sun is going down; nevertheless, he puts on his pack, picks up his rod, and walks toward the still, swift river, where he sees the trout rising toward the surface. 

He climbs up a hill toward two pines where he sets up camp, the narrator relating the minute details as if the process were an ancient ritual. Nick starts a fire, unpacks, opens a can of beans and a can of spaghetti, dumps them both into a pan, and cooks them together over the fire. Next, Nick makes a pot of coffee using a method he got from an old friend named Hopkins. Nick recalls a camping trip years earlier with Hopkins and another friend named Bill. He remembers that Hopkins got a telegram stating that an oil well he owned had struck oil and he was rich. Nick recalls how they all made plans to go fishing on Lake Superior the following summer, but they never saw Hopkins again: “It made a good ending to the story,” Nick thinks to himself and laughs (Paragraph 37). Nick retreats to his tent, stretching under his blanket, and falls asleep, ending Part 1.

Part 2 begins with Nick waking and emerging from his tent. He puts his kettle on to make coffee, and, while he waits for the water to boil, he goes down to the meadow to catch grasshoppers for bait. He finds plenty of “hoppers” under a log, too cold to hop away, and puts them in a jar. He makes buckwheat pancakes and eats them with apple butter for breakfast, then packs onion sandwiches in his shirt pockets for lunch.

Nick then assembles his rod, attaches the reel, and ties a leader to the strong fly line. Nick heads down to the river with his rod in his hand, the jar of grasshoppers tied around his neck, a landing net hanging from his belt, and a flour sack to put fish in thrown over his shoulder. He wades into the water over his knees, the water shocking him with the cold.

With his first cast, he gets a strike, but the fish is small. Nick returns it to the water after first wetting his hands so that he does not disturb the mucus covering the trout’s skin and cause a fatal fungus. After the next cast, there is a long tug, and his rod “came alive and dangerous, bent double, the line tightening, all in a heavy, dangerous, steady pull” (Paragraph 65). A huge trout tugs on the end of the line, and then jumps out of the water. Nick feels the strain on the line go tight and then slack as his leader breaks and the fish gets away.

The moment is electric: “There was a heaviness, a power not to be held, and then the bulk of him, as he jumped. He looked broad as a salmon” (Paragraph 69). Nick is shaken by the moment and sits down on a log to smoke a cigarette. He ties another leader to his line, hooks another grasshopper, and then goes back to the river. Near where the meadow meets the forest, an uprooted elm tree has created a pool with deep channels. Nick casts his line into one of these channels and immediately catches another fish that he successfully reels in and catches in his net. He now has one trout and does not care about getting many. Nick then drops his line and lets the current move it under an overhanging branch. He gets another strike, but it gets off. Finally, he lets his line drift into a hollow log and immediately catches another fish.

Nick puts the fish in the bag with the other one, hangs it on the log, and hoists himself up out of the river. Sitting on the log, he eats his sandwiches, drinks fresh water from the river, and smokes another cigarette. He looks down the river where it narrows and flows into the forbidding swamp, filled with cedar trees, trunks close together and branches low. He wishes he had brought something to read. He does not want to go down the river any farther today. He cleans his fish, washes them in the river, and then walks back to camp: “There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp,” he thinks to himself (Paragraph 102).