A Very Short Story

“A Very Short Story” is one of Ernest Hemingway’s earliest literary works. It originally appeared as one of 18 vignettes that made up the chapbook in our time, published in 1924. The story was later republished, along with the original vignettes and 14 additional short stories, in a new and expanded edition of In Our Time in 1925. This guide refers to that later edition.

“A Very Short Story” is semi-autobiographical, based loosely upon Hemingway’s own experiences as a soldier during World War I. It explores such themes as love and loss, wartime romance, and coming of age. The title of the work presages the extreme brevity of the story and the style, which achieves an extreme economy of language and leaves many details and character motivations up to the interpretation of the reader. Like the unnamed protagonist of the story, Hemingway himself suffered an injury—to his leg—while serving on the Italian front during World War I. Subsequently, while recovering in an army hospital, he had a brief and passionate, but ultimately failed, love affair with a nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. He revisited this affair in literary form later in his career in the novel

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