The (Urban) Legend of Ernest Hemingway’s Six-Word Story: “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.”

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; Nev­er Used!”—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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Down­load 55 Free Online Lit­er­a­ture Cours­es: From Dante and Mil­ton to Ker­ouac and Tolkien

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness