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"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." is a six-word story, and one of the most famous examples of flash fiction. Versions of the story date back to the early 1900s, and it was being reproduced and expanded upon within a few years of its initial publication. [1] [2]
The story is popularly misattributed to Ernest Hemingway; this is implausible, as versions of the story first appeared in 1906, when Hemingway was 7 years old, and it was first attributed to him in 1991, 30 years after his death. [1] [3]
The story is in the form of a classified ad, and suggests a larger narrative involving pregnancy loss, sudden infant death, or abandoned plans for a child. [1]
Examples of classified ads reading "For sale: baby carriage, never used" date back to as early as 1883. [4] The May 16, 1910, edition of The Spokane Press had an article titled "Tragedy of Baby's Death is Revealed in Sale of Clothes." [2] [1]
In 1917, William R. Kane published a piece in a periodical called The Editor where he outlined the basic idea of a grief-stricken woman who had lost her baby and even suggested the title of Little Shoes, Never Worn. [3] In his version of the story, the shoes are being given away rather than sold. He suggests that this would provide some measure of solace for the owner, as it would mean that another baby would at least benefit directly. [5]
By 1921, the story was already being parodied: the July issue of Judge that year published a version that used a baby carriage instead of shoes; there, however, the narrator described contacting the seller to offer condolences, only to be told that the sale was due to the birth of twins rather than of a single child. [1]
The story is often attributed to American writer Ernest Hemingway. The earliest known connection to him was in 1991, thirty years after the author's death. [1] The claim of Hemingway's authorship originates in an unsubstantiated anecdote about a wager among him and other writers. Hemingway is said to have claimed he could write a short story only six words long. This attribution was in a book by Peter Miller called Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent's Tips on How to Sell Your Writing. He said he was told the story by a "well-established newspaper syndicator" in 1974. [6] In a 1991 letter to Canadian humorist John Robert Colombo, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke recounts: "He's [Hemingway] supposed to have won a $10 bet (no small sum in the '20s) from his fellow writers. They paid up without a word. ... Here it is. I still can't think of it without crying— FOR SALE. BABY SHOES. NEVER WORN." [1]
This connection to Hemingway was reinforced by a one-man play called Papa by John De Groot, which debuted in 1996. Set during a Life magazine photo session in 1959, De Groot has the character utter the phrase as a means of illustrating Hemingway's brevity. [1] In Playbill , De Groot defended his portrayal of Hemingway by saying, "Everything in the play is based on events as described by Ernest Hemingway, or those who knew him well. Whether or not these things actually happened is something we'll never know truly. But Hemingway and many others claimed they did." [7]
Telling a story in very few words was dubbed flash fiction in 1992. The six-word limit in particular has spawned the concept of Six-Word Memoirs , [8] including a collection published in book form in 2008 by Smith Magazine , and two sequels published in 2009.
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Known for an economical, understated style that influenced later 20th-century writers, he has been romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle and outspoken, blunt public image. Some of his seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works have become classics of American literature, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature.
John Henry O'Hara was an American writer. He was one of America's most prolific writers of short stories, credited with helping to invent The New Yorker magazine short story style. He became a best-selling novelist before the age of 30 with Appointment in Samarra and BUtterfield 8. While O'Hara's legacy as a writer is debated, his work was praised by such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his champions rank him highly among the major under-appreciated American writers of the 20th century. Few college students educated after O'Hara's death in 1970 have discovered him, chiefly because he refused to allow his work to be reprinted in anthologies used to teach literature at the college level.
The Sun Also Rises is the first novel by the American writer Ernest Hemingway. It portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona and watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is now "recognized as Hemingway's greatest work" and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by Scribner's. A year later, Jonathan Cape published the novel in London under the title Fiesta. It remains in print.
Flash fiction is a brief fictional narrative that still offers character and plot development. Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story ; the "dribble" ; the "drabble" ; "sudden fiction" ; "flash fiction" ; and "microstory".
"Hills Like White Elephants" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published in August 1927, in the literary magazine transition, then later in the 1927 short story collection Men Without Women. Later the story was adapted for film in 2002. "Hills Like White Elephants" is a short 38-minute film; British actor Greg Wise played The American.
The Garden of Eden is the second posthumously released novel of Ernest Hemingway, published in 1986. Hemingway started the novel in 1946 and worked on the manuscript for the next 15 years, during which time he also wrote The Old Man and the Sea, The Dangerous Summer, A Moveable Feast, and Islands in the Stream.
In Our Time is the title of Ernest Hemingway's first collection of short stories, published in 1925 by Boni & Liveright, New York, and of a collection of vignettes published in 1924 in France titled in our time. Its title is derived from the English Book of Common Prayer, "Give peace in our time, O Lord".
True at First Light is a book by American writer Ernest Hemingway about his 1953–54 safari in Kenya with his fourth wife Mary. It was released posthumously in his centennial year in 1999. In the book, which blends memoir and fiction, Hemingway explores conflict within a marriage, the conflict between the European and native cultures in Africa, and the fear a writer feels when his work becomes impossible. True at First Light includes descriptions of his earlier friendships with other writers and digressive ruminations on the nature of writing.
Across the River and Into the Trees is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons in 1950, after first being serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine earlier that year. The title is derived from the last words of Confederate States Army General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, who was mortally wounded by friendly fire during the American Civil War: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” In the 19th century, this was understood to refer to the Jordan River and the passage to death and afterlife in Christianity.
The iceberg theory or theory of omission is a writing technique coined by American writer Ernest Hemingway. As a young journalist, Hemingway had to focus his newspaper reports on immediate events, with very little context or interpretation. When he became a writer of short stories, he retained this minimalistic style, focusing on surface elements without explicitly discussing underlying themes. Hemingway believed the deeper meaning of a story should not be evident on the surface, but should shine through implicitly.
Fiction writing is the composition of non-factual prose texts. Fictional writing often is produced as a story meant to entertain or convey an author's point of view. The result of this may be a short story, novel, novella, screenplay, or drama, which are all types of fictional writing styles. Different types of authors practice fictional writing, including novelists, playwrights, short story writers, radio dramatists and screenwriters.
The Hemingway Hoax is a short novel by science fiction writer Joe Haldeman. It weaves together a story of an attempt to produce a fake Ernest Hemingway manuscript with themes concerning time travel and parallel worlds. A shorter version of the book won both a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1991.
"Big Two-Hearted River" is a two-part short story written by American author Ernest Hemingway, published in the 1925 Boni & Liveright edition of In Our Time, the first American volume of Hemingway's short stories. It features a single protagonist, Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams, whose speaking voice is heard just three times. The story explores the destructive qualities of war which is countered by the healing and regenerative powers of nature. When it was published, critics praised Hemingway's sparse writing style and it became an important work in his canon.
A sketch story, literary sketch or simply sketch, is a piece of writing that is generally shorter than a short story, and contains very little, if any, plot. The genre was invented after the 16th century in England, as a result of increasing public interest in realistic depictions of "exotic" locales. The term was most popularly used in the late nineteenth century. As a literary work, it is also often referred to simply as "the sketch".
"Indian Camp" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical character Nick Adams—a child in this story—makes his first appearance in "Indian Camp", told from his point of view.
Six-Word Memoirs is a project and book series created by the U.S. based online storytelling magazine Smith Magazine.
Larry Smith is an American author and editor, and publisher of Smith Magazine. He is best known for developing the best-selling book series Six-Word Memoirs, a literary subgenre that took on a life of its own in popular culture as publications began holding reader contests and publishing the results. The form has been described as "American haiku." Smith credits Ernest Hemingway's reputed shortest story, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn", with inspiring the viral literary movement.
"Cross Country Snow" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. The story was first published in 1924 in Ford Madox Ford's literary magazine Transatlantic Review in Paris and republished by Boni & Liveright in Hemingway's first American volume of short stories In Our Time in 1925. The story features Hemingway's recurrent autobiographical character Nick Adams and explores the regenerative powers of nature and the joy of skiing.
"On Writing" is a story fragment written by Ernest Hemingway which he omitted from the end of his short story, "Big Two-Hearted River", when it was published in 1925 in In Our Time. It was then published after Hemingway's death in the 1972 collection The Nick Adams Stories.
Micro-SFP (μSFP) describes an ultra-short science-fiction story written for the specific purpose of capturing inventive ideas for product or service innovations. It is a combination of three concepts, first science-fiction prototyping, second flash fiction and finally, Twitter and texting.