According to Hemingway biographer James R. Mellon, Hemingway regarded "Big Two-Hearted River" as the "climactic story in [his short story collection] In Our Time and the culminating episode in the Nick Adams adventures that he included in the book."
That comment ought to spark the curiosity of readers of this story, for, on the surface, very little happens in the story. Seemingly, it goes nowhere. If, however, one has read Thoreau's Walden, it is relatively easy to see that Hemingway is portraying Nick Adams' attempt to achieve a bonding with nature that Thoreau, in 1845, was seeking when he decided to live a simple, semi-solitary life at Walden Pond. In Walden, Thoreau says: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . . and see if I could learn what it had to teach. . . . I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life."
