By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Banal Story’ is one of the shortest stories Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) ever wrote. Running to just two pages in most editions, the story first appeared in the Little Review magazine in 1926 before being collected in Hemingway’s Men Without Women the following year.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Cat in the Rain’ is a very short story by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), published in his early 1925 collection In Our Time. Hemingway wrote ‘Cat in the Rain’ for his wife Hadley while they were living in Paris. She wanted to get a cat, but he said they were too poor.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Day’s Wait’ is one of Ernest Hemingway’s shortest short stories, running to just a few pages. It was published in 1927 in his collection The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. In just a few pages, ‘A Day’s Wait’ covers a number of key features of Hemingway’s work as a whole, and so despite not being one of his best-known stories, it’s oddly representative of his oeuvre as a whole.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of a well-known phrase
Who coined the phrase ‘Lost Generation’? The term has become synonymous with the generation of American expatriates living in France after the First World War: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other men in their early twenties during the early twenties. Most people credit the origins of the phrase ‘Lost Generation’ to Gertrude Stein, another American expatriate living in France at the time (albeit one who was a whole generation older than the Lost Generation). But did Stein actually coin it? And if she didn’t, who did?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. As a young boy, Ernest Hemingway was dressed in girls’ clothing by his mother and referred to as ‘Ernestine’.
We begin this selection of great Ernest Hemingway facts with a rather revealing nugget about his childhood: Hemingway’s mother had been hoping for a girl.