Reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s

In 1924 Ernest Hemingway published a small book of eighteen vignettes, each little more than one page long, with a small press in Paris. Titled in our time, the volume was later absorbed into Hemingway’s story collection In Our Time. Those vignettes, as Milton Cohen demonstrates in Hemingway’s Laboratory, reveal a range of voices, narrative strategies, and fictional interests more wide-ranging and experimental than any other extant work of Hemingway’s. Further, they provide a vivid view of his earliest tendencies and influences, first manifestations of the style that would become his hallmark, and daring departures into narrative forms that he would forever leave behind.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores in-depth a topic previously neglected by scholars:  John Steinbeck's early continuing preoccupation with ecology and marine biology and the effect of that interest on his writings.  Written by scholars from various disciplines, the essays offer a dynamic contribution to the study of John Steinbeck by considering his writings from an environmental perspective.  They reveal Steinbeck as a prophet that was ahead of his time and supremely relevant to our own.