A Very Short Story

Pages: 156
Language: English

"A Very Short Story" is a brief, bitter piece from Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time (1925), drawn in part from his own wartime experience in Italy. A wounded soldier and the nurse who cares for him, Luz, fall in love during his convalescence and plan to marry after he sails home to secure a job and a future for them both.

Separation does its work. In a handful of terse paragraphs that span months and continents, Hemingway traces how the promise erodes, and closes on a note of casual disillusion. The story is a model of his early economy — plain, unsentimental, and quietly devastating in what it declines to spell out.

Prose complexity: 4/10

Melancholic Sad Gritty Reflective

Short Stories Classics Literary Fiction

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 – 2 July 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist whose spare, understated prose reshaped twentieth-century fiction. Born in Oak Park, Illinois, he worked briefly as a reporter before serving as an American Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in the First World War, where he was seriously wounded by mortar fire in July 1918 and decorated for helping other wounded men to safety. He settled in Paris in the early 1920s as a...