Fiction 08: Ernest Hemingway's A Very Short Story

A Very Short Story was first published in the 1924 Paris edition of In Our Time.

Everyone loved Ernest Hemingway, even when he was no longer at his best. Hemingway, the brand, despite the writer growing into a wearing machine was going strong. Magazines carried his pictures on the cover and wherever he went he was treated well. But the carping critics were determined to pin him to the wall and for several years some of them continued to make evident their dislike for his writing style.

There were those who liked Hemingway and there were those who hated him. “The short words, the declarative sentences, the repetition, the beautiful absence of subordinate clauses,” is how one critic describes his style. It was said most of his tricks were good but because he kept repeating them until they went slate.

Lilian Ross’s 1950 New Yorker profile of the writer was also an attack of sorts on his personality as he comes across a man in him who outrightly silly and pointless at times. He’s shown as abnormal and out of his wits. It is believed that Ross had sent advance proofs t…