A Farewell to ArmsThis is my feeble attempt to interpret the breathtaking micro story from the great master Ernest Hemingway.Imagine a cold winter night. A girl in her twenties is standing on a pavement trying to sell her most valuable possession, the shoes her mother made for her when she was a tiny little baby. In her hand was a small cardboard flashing those six words "For sale: baby shoes, never worn"Baby shoes are prone to get damaged easier due to rugged use by the little ones. But the girl takes pride in her mother's shoe making ability by mentioning the words "never worn" on her flashing cardboard sign.(PS - Never worn is roughly translated from Cambridge dictionary as "not at any time or not on any occasion" "damaged because of continuous use".)She is not here to sell the shoes for money or bread. She thinks its time to display her mother's innate shoe making ability to the world by selling it.(this is just my interpretation) A 6-word "novel" regarding a pair of baby shoes is considered an extreme example of flash fiction.
"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." is the entirety of what has been described as a six-word novel, making it an extreme example of what is called flash fiction or sudden fiction. Although it is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, the link to him is unsubstantiated and similar stories predate him. The claim of Hemingway's authorship originates in an unsubstantiated anecdote about a wager between him and other writers. In a 1992 letter to Canadian humorist John Robert Colombo, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke recounts it thus: While lunching with friends at a restaurant (variously identified as Luchow's or The Algonquin), Hemingway bets the table ten dollars each that he can craft an entire story in six words. After the pot is assembled, Hemingway writes "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" on a napkin, passes this around the table, and collects his winnings. This May 16, 1910 article from The Spokane Press recounts an earlier advertisement which struck the author as particularly tragic.
The May 16, 1910, edition of The Spokane Press had an article titled "Tragedy of Baby's Death is Revealed in Sale of Clothes." At that time, Hemingway would only have been aged ten, and years away from beginning his writing career. 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.[2] 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 seller, as it would mean that another baby would at least benefit directly. 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. The earliest known connection to Hemingway was in 1991, thirty years after the author’s death.
[1] 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 claimed he was told the story by a "well-established newspaper syndicator" in 1974.[4] In 1992, John Robert Colombo printed a letter from Arthur C. Clarke that repeated the story, complete with Hemingway having won $10 each from fellow writers. This connection to Hemingway was reinforced by a one-man play called Papa by John deGroot, which debuted in 1996. Set during a Life magazine photo session in 1959, deGroot has the character utter the phrase as a means of illustrating Hemingway’s brevity.[1] In Playbill, deGroot 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." The general concept of trying to tell a story with the absolute minimum of words became known by the general term of flash fiction.
The six-word limit in particular has spawned the concept of Six-Word Memoirs,[6] including a collection published in book form in 2008 by Smith Magazine, and two sequels published in 2009.Six Word Story Lyrics For sale: baby shoes, never worn. About “Six Word Story” There’s been a craze in the literary world over the six word story. Hemingway receives credit as the inventor of the six word story. Supposedly, fellow writers challenged him to write a story in only six words. Subsequently, he produced, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The short phrase, though lacking many elements of traditional stories, did, in a sense, possess a beginning, middle, and end. Hemingway, according to legend, won the bet. Of course, the accuracy of this fabled tale is dubious. Indeed, the tale doesn’t go back much farther than the 1990s. Quote Investigator recently uncovered versions of the story predating Hemingway’s career and based on real newspaper ads. Regardless, the six words have inspired a literary movement based on exploring how much can be said with very little.
A piercingly dark piece of writing, taking the heart of a Dickens or Dostoevsky novel and carving away all the rest, Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story—fabled forerunner of flash- and twitter-fiction—is shorter than many a story’s title: For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn. The extreme terseness in this elliptical tragedy has made it a favorite example of writing teachers over the past several decades, a display of the power of literary compression in which, writes a querent to the site Quote Investigator, “the reader must cooperate in the construction of the larger narrative that is obliquely limned by these words.” Supposedly composed sometime in the ’20s at The Algonquin (or perhaps Luchow’s, depending on whom you ask), the six-word story, it’s said, came from a ten-dollar bet Hemingway made at a lunch with some other writers that he could write a novel in six words. After penning the famous line on a napkin, he passed it around the table, and collected his winnings.
That’s the popular lore, anyway. But the truth is much less colorful. In fact, it seems that versions of the six-word story appeared long before Hemingway even began to write, at least as early as 1906, when he was only 7, in a newspaper classified section called “Terse Tales of the Town,” which published an item that read, “For sale, baby carriage, never been used. Apply at this office.” Another, very similar, version appeared in 1910, then another, suggested as the title for a story about “a wife who has lost her baby,” in a 1917 essay by William R. Kane, who thought up “Little Shoes, Never Worn.” Then again in 1920, writes David Haglund in Slate, the supposed Hemingway line appears in a “1921 newspaper column by Roy K. Moulton, who ‘printed a brief note that he attributed to someone named Jerry,'”: There was an ad in the Brooklyn “Home Talk” which read, “Baby carriage for sale, never used.” Would that make a wonderful plot for the movies?
Many more examples of the narrative device abound, including a 1927 comic strip describing a seven-word version—“For Sale, A Baby Carriage; —as “the greatest short story in the world.” The more that Haglund and Quote Investigator’s Garson O’Toole looked into the matter, the harder they found it to “believe that Hemingway had anything to do with the tale.” It is possible Hemingway, wittingly or not, stole the story from the classifieds or elsewhere. He was a newspaperman after all, perhaps guaranteed to have come into contact with some version of it. But there’s no evidence that he wrote or talked about the six-word story, or that the lunch bet at The Algonquin ever took place. Instead, it appears that a literary agent, Peter Miller, made up the story whole cloth in 1974 and later published it in his 1991 book, Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent’s Tips on How to Sell Your Writing. The legend of the bet and the six-word story grew: Arthur C. Clarke repeated it in a 1998 Reader’s Digest essay, and Miller mentioned it again in a 2006 book.
Meanwhile, suspicions arose, and the final debunking occurred in a 2012 scholarly article in The Journal of Popular Culture by Frederick A. Wright, who concluded that no evidence links the six-word story to Hemingway. So should we blame Miller for ostensibly creating an urban legend, or thank him for giving competitive minimalists something to beat, and inspiring the entire genre of the “six-word memoir”? That depends, I suppose, on what you think of competitive minimalists and six-word memoirs. Perhaps the moral of the story, fitting in the Twitter age, is that the great man theory of authorship so often gets it wrong; the most memorable stories and ideas can arise spontaneously, anonymously, from anywhere. Ernest Hemingway Creates a Reading List for a Young Writer, 1934 Ernest Hemingway’s Very First Published Stories, Free as an eBook 18 (Free) Books Ernest Hemingway Wished He Could Read Again for the First Time Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC.