Men Without Women 

By Ernest Hemingway

128 pages

First published in 1927

Men Without Women is Hemingway’s second short story collection. There are 14 stories in all. Most are short and sparse, more journal entries than fully developed stories. But four of them – The Killers, Fifty Grand, Hills Like White Elephants, and In Another Country – are complete and very good.

I read it while I was in the hospital last week, nodding in and out of consciousness. It was a literary balm to soothe my ontological anxiety.

Critical Response 

* Ray Long, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan, said that Fifty Grand was “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.”

* Percy Hutchinson, in the New York Times Book Review, praised the collection 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.”

* Joseph Wood Krutch called the stories in Men Without Women “Sordid little catastrophes” involving “very vulgar people.”

Interesting 

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 callus)

Hemingway’s style, on the other hand, received much acclaim. Even Krutch, writing in the Nation in 1927, said, “Men Without Women appears to be the most meticulously literal reporting and yet it reproduces dullness without being dull.”