Men Without Women (short story collection)

Men Without Women

Author	Ernest Hemingway
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Short stories
Publisher	Charles Scribner's Sons
Publication date	1927
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
OCLC	564429937

Men Without Women (1927) is the second collection of short stories written by American author Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961). The volume consists of fourteen stories, ten of which had been previously published in magazines. It was published in October 1927, with a first print-run of approximately 7600 copies at $2.^[1]

The subject matter of the stories in the collection includes bullfighting, prizefighting, infidelity, divorce, and death. "The Killers", "Hills Like White Elephants", and "In Another Country" are considered to be among Hemingway's best work.^[2]

Stories included in volume

The volume includes the following stories:

"The Undefeated"
"In Another Country"
"Hills Like White Elephants"
"The Killers"
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?"
"Fifty Grand"
"A Simple Enquiry"
"Ten Indians"
"A Canary for One"
"An Alpine Idyll"
"A Pursuit Race"
"Today is Friday"
"Banal Story"
"Now I Lay Me"

Reception

Men Without Women was variously received by critics. Cosmopolitan magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised the story "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands...the best prize-fight story I ever read...a remarkable piece of realism."^[3]

Some critics, however—among them Wilson Lee Dodd whose article entitled "Simple Annals of the Callous" appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature—found Hemingway's subjects lacking. Joseph Wood Krutch called the stories in Men Without Women "Sordid little catastrophes", involving "very vulgar people."^[4]

Hemingway responded to the less favorable reviews with a poem published in The Little Review in May 1929:

                Valentine
                 (For a Mr. Lee Wilson Dodd and Any of His Friends Who Want It)

                     Sing a song of critics
                     pockets full of lye
                     four and twenty critics
                     hope that you will die
                     hope that you will peter out
                     hope that you will fail
                     so they can be the first one
                     be the first to hail
                     any happy weakening or sign of quick decay.
                     (All very much alike, weariness too great,
                     sordid small catastrophes, stack the cards on fate,
                     very vulgar people, annals of the callous,
                     dope fiends, soldiers, prostitutes,
                     men without a gallus)^[1]

^ Hemingway, Ernest (May 1929). "Valentine". Little Review XII: 42.

Hemingway's style, on the other hand, received much acclaim. In the New York Times Book Review, Percy Hutchinson praised him for "language sheered to the bone, colloquial language expended with the utmost frugality; but it is continuous and the effect is one of continuously gathering power."^[5] Even Krutch, writing in the Nation in 1927, said of Men Without Women, "It appears to be the most meticulously literal reporting and yet it reproduces dullness without being dull."^[5]

Notes

↑ Oliver, pp. 218–218
↑ Meyers 1985, pp. 195–196
↑ Long, pp. 2-3
↑ Weeks, Robert P., ed. Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962. Print.
1 2 Bryer, Jackson R., ed. "Fifteen Modern American Authors: A Survey of Research and Criticism". Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1969. Print.

References

Baker, Carlos (1972). Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (4th ed.). Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01305-5.
Flora, Joseph M. (2008) "Reading Hemingway's Men Without Women." Kent, OH: The Kent State UP.
Long, Ray - editor. (1932). "Why Editors Go Wrong: 'Fifty Grand' by Ernest Hemingway", 20 Best Stories in Ray Long's 20 Years as an Editor. New York: Crown Publishers. 1-3
Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4.
Mellow, James R. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3.
Oliver, Charles M. (1999). Ernest Hemingway A to Z: The Essential Reference to the Life and Work. New York: Checkmark. ISBN 0-8160-3467-2.

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Non-fiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

Short stories

"Indian Camp" (1925)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1926)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Letters and
journalism

Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet

"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story

A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series

To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)

For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1965 TV series Metallica song

The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 miniseries 1999 film

Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977)

External links

Literary encyclopedia review

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