A Soldier's Home Essay Introduction
Ernest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” first published in June 1925 in the Contact
Collection of Contemporary Writers, follows Harold Krebs, a former U.S. Marine who
returns to his Oklahoma hometown after serving in World War I. Although the community
expects returning soldiers to resume ordinary life, Krebs finds himself unable to reconnect
with the people and routines that once seemed familiar to him. His reluctance to discuss
his war experiences honestly and his difficulty adjusting to expectations surrounding work,
romance, and family reveal the distance between his wartime experience and civilian life.
Through Krebs’s alienation and struggle to readjust, Hemingway examines the
psychological and social difficulties faced by a soldier whose experience of war has
changed his relationship with the world to which he has returned.
