The Torrents of Spring
Ernest Hemingway
 Set in northern Michigan in the mid-1920s The Torrents of Spring is about two men, World War I veteran Yogi Johnson and writer Scripps O'Neill, both of whom work at a pump factory. The story begins with O'Neill returning home to find that his wife and small daughter have left him. O'Neill befriends a British waitress, Diana, at a "beanery" (diner) and asks her to marry him immediately but soon becomes disenchanted with her. Diana tries to impress her husband by reading books from the lists of The New York Times Book Reviews, but he soon leaves her (as she feared he would) for another waitress, Mandy, who enthralls him with literary (but possibly made up) anecdotes. Johnson, who becomes depressed after a Parisian prostitute leaves him for a British officer, has a period during which he anguishes over the fact that he doesn't seem to desire any woman at all, even though spring is approaching. Ultimately, he falls in love with a native American woman who enters a restaurant clothed only in moccasins, the wife of one of the two Indians he befriends near the end of the story.