The subject that most fascinated Ernest Hemingway as a writer revealed itself to be Ernest Hemingway, and his fiction started off and remained intensely autobiographical. In early short stories, he invented the character of Nick Adams as a stand-in for himself. Nick Adams provided Hemingway with a sort of buffer, shielding him from having to acknowledge self-criticism and also allowing him to create a perhaps more pleasing version of himself: Adams is more optimistic and less flawed than his creator.
