One of the High Modernists, Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1899. “Indian Camp” draws on Hemingway’s childhood experiences visiting Northern Michigan. Hemingway’s father was also a physician, which might have informed some of the story’s medical details. Throughout his life, Hemingway worked as a reporter, covering several wars, including the Spanish Civil War. He was one of many expatriate artists living in Paris, and he later lived in Cuba, Florida, and Idaho.

A leader in the Modernist movement, Hemingway collaborated with writers such as Ford Madox Ford (who first published “Indian Camp” in his literary magazine), Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a Modernist, Hemingway broke stylistic conventions and experimented with language. He is most well-known for his signature writing style, which consists of short, direct sentences and straightforward dialogue. This led to his “iceberg theory” of writing, alluding to the fact that only a small portion of an iceberg is visible above water, its great mass concealed beneath the surface. As he explained in Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway believed that a writer who “knows enough of what he is writing about” can “omit things that he knows” and yet, the reader will “have a feeling of those things as though the writer had stated them” (Hemingway, Ernest.