The names Jim and Liz, the story’s two main characters, were taken from a married couple Hemingway knew in Michigan, and the physical details of the landscape undoubtedly recall the author’s adolescent enjoyment of the area surrounding Little Traverse Bay. The story is about sexual awakening, and Hemingway biographers have posited that Hemingway experienced his own sexual awakening during one of these summers in Michigan at Little Traverse Bay. The setting of the story and indeed, the content of it recalls Hemingway’s boyhood summer vacations in Michigan. “Up in Michigan” is one of the earliest stories Hemingway wrote after arriving in Paris in 1921.
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Hemingway’s third collection, Men Without Women, appeared in 1927 and included “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Simple Enquiry,” and Nick Adams stories “In Another Country” and “The Killers.” Hemingway’s fourth collection, published in 1933 and entitled Winner Take Nothing, included “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” and Nick Adams stories “A Day’s Wait” and “ Fathers and Sons.” His next collection, The Fifth Column, and the First Forty- Nine Stories, was published in 1938 and, in addition to re-publishing his earlier works, introduced “The Capital of the World,” “Old Man at the Bridge,” and well-known African stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
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The first of these collections, and his first major published work, was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) this collection included the story “Up in Michigan.” He published his second short story collection, In Our Time, in 1924, with a revised edition appearing in 1925. Many of Hemingway’s short stories appeared in various magazines before being anthologized in his short story collections.