The darkest of the story collections: insomnia, nada, and 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' — the code with the lights going out.
The third and bleakest collection, published in 1933: fourteen stories in which the Hemingway code confronts what it was built to hold off — sleeplessness, age, faithlessness, and the nothing that gives 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' its whispered prayer. Reviewers found it grim; time has found it central: the collection contains some of his most quietly radical work, and its title announces the wager of the whole shelf — the winner of these games takes nothing. (A collection — nothing here to spoil.)
The stories come from the first Key West years — success achieved, the second marriage settled, and the material turning inward and downward. The masterpiece is six pages long: 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,' an old waiter, a young waiter, a deaf old man who tried to hang himself, and the necessity of a clean, lighted café against the dark — ending in the famous parody prayer with nada in every clause. It has plausibly generated more commentary per word than anything else in American fiction.
The rest of the collection keeps the temperature low and the stakes final: 'The Light of the World' with its whores and boxers disputing a dead man's memory in a station; 'A Way You'll Never Be' returning Nick Adams to the front lines with his mind visibly breaking; 'Fathers and Sons' closing the book with Nick, now a father himself, circling the suicide of his own — written by a man whose father had shot himself five years before. Gothic pieces like 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen' push into territory the earlier books wouldn't touch. It sold modestly and reviewed worse; it reads now like the collection where the method met its real subject.
Fourteen stories from the dark shelf: 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' at the center; Nick Adams shell-shocked in 'A Way You'll Never Be' and reckoning with his father in 'Fathers and Sons'; 'The Light of the World' and its argued-over dead prizefighter; 'God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen,' a Kansas City Christmas grotesque; 'Wine of Wyoming,' 'The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio,' and the rest — hospitals, stations, and cafés, the code's last venues.
Start with the six pages of 'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place'; the whole collection is its shadow, lengthened.
'A Clean, Well-Lighted Place' may be the best very short story in English — the entire philosophy, closing time included.
'A Way You'll Never Be' shows the war damage the earlier stories kept underwater — the iceberg, surfacing.
No collection names its own wager better — the games are real, the code holds, and the winner takes nothing.
On Christmas Day in a Kansas City hospital, two bickering doctors face a distraught boy who has taken scripture's hardest line literally — and fail him. Six of the darkest pages Hemingway ever published, drawn from his cub-reporter years in that city's emergency rooms. The story appeared first on its own, as a 300-copy House of Books limited edition in 1933, months before this collection gathered it in.
1933
"God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" appears on its own as a 300-copy House of Books limited edition, months before the collection gathers it in.
1933
Scribner publishes the collection, fourteen stories built around "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place"; its first reviewers call it grim and minor, and its standing has climbed since.
The middle collection — this one turns its professionals' twilight fully dark.
Read our take
Where Nick Adams began — read against 'Fathers and Sons,' the arc completes.
Read our take
The Depression-era bleakness, carried into the novel that followed.
Read our takeErnest Hemingway. It was his third short-story collection, published in 1933.
Fourteen stories in which the Hemingway code confronts what it was built to hold off — sleeplessness, age, faithlessness, and the "nothing" at the heart of "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," a six-page story often ranked among his very finest.
It announces the collection's wager: the winner of these games takes nothing — the bleakest statement of the world Hemingway's fiction inhabits.
It is the third and bleakest, after In Our Time and Men Without Women — grim to its first reviewers, and central to later ones.
