MISSISSIPPI RIVER

The Place
The Mississippi River, the fourth longest river in the world, is a dividing line of the United States. Coursing through the American heartland, the Mississippi divides the U.S.A. into two halves, east and west. Due to its immense size, the Mississippi is also an impressive physical sight. Anyone who has seen the “Mighty Mississippi” can testify to the grandeur of the river. Ernest Hemingway’s character Nick Adams encounters the great river in the story “Crossing The Mississippi”.


The mighty Mississippi

The Story
The story is set in the fall of 1917, shortly before Nick left for World War I. Nick is heading west from Chicago, where he had watched Game One of the 1917 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants. Happy Felsch’s solo homerun, described by Hemingway, proved to be the deciding factor in a two to one White Sox victory at White Sox (later Comiskey) Park [1].

Nick was likely riding on the Chicago & Alton railroad, the primary railroad connection between Chicago and Kansas City. The C&A was a dominant railway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also the home to the first of George Pullman’s innovative sleeping and dining cars. The C&A crosses the Mississippi River at Quincy, three hundred miles north of St. Louis, and it is this crossing that Nick describes in “Crossing The Mississippi" [2].

Nick is crossing the Mississippi for the first time, and feels the crossing will be “a big event”. He describes the immense river as a “solid, shifting lake,” a rather perfect description. Nick seems somewhat disappointed in the Mississippi’s appearance, although happy that he has seen the great American river. Considering the traumas he will soon encounter in World War I, the crossing of the Mississippi seems trivial. At this point, Nick is still quite young and naïve. However, he is about to discover the horrors of war. The disappointment he sees in the Mississippi may be a precursor to his war experience. After being in the front lines, everything will seem insignificant, even the Mississippi River.


The C&A line Adams rode across the Mississippi

The Hemingway Connection

While Hemingway likely rode the railway several times during his stint as a reporter at the Kansas City Star, there is no record of Hemingway’s first glimpse of the river. Whether or not he modeled “Crossing The Mississippi” on his own experience is thus a question that cannot be definitively answered. “Crossing The Mississippi” was not published until after Hemingway’s death, in Philip Young’s collection of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories. Young refers to the story as a ‘sketch in an artist’s notebook’,” and it has been treated as such, with little critical analysis.