My Old Man (short story)

[[File:Ertory written by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1923 in Paris the book Three Stories and Ten Poems. It was included in his next collection of stories, In Our Time, published in New York in 1925 by Boni & Liveright. The story tells of a boy named Joe whose father is a steeplechase jockey, and is narrated from Joe's point-of-view.

Written in 1922, as one of Hemingway's earliest stories critics generally regard it as juvenilia, along with "Up in Michigan" also published in Three Stories and Ten Poems. Critical attention focuses chiefly on three issues: Sherwood Anderson's influence, the story's narrative structure, and the question of whether Joe's father is moral or immoral.

The story was the basis for the 1950 film Under My Skin, and the 1979 film My Old Man.

Hemingway and his wife Hadley lived in Paris where he was foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star from 1922 until Hadley became pregnant in 1923 when they returned to Toronto. During his absence, Bill Bird's Parisian Three Mountains Press published a small collection of Hemingway's work, Three Stories and Ten Poems, which included "My Old Man". During the "great suitcase debacle" of the previous year, when a suitcase containing all of Hemingway's manuscripts was stolen from Hadley at a Paris train station, "My Old Man" was one of two stories to survive because it was in the post to editors.

In 1925 the story was reprinted in the New York edition of In Our Time, published by Boni & Liveright.

The story opens with Joe living in Italy with his father, Butler, who is a steeplechase jockey, riding in races on tracks in the Milan and Turin area. One day Joe sees two men, one named Holbrook, engage in a tense conversation with his father. After, Butler says to his son, "You got to take a lot things in this world, Joe."

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