A Very Short Story

by Ernest Hemingway

"A Very Short Story" is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway. It was first published as a vignette, or chapter, in the 1924 Paris edition titled In Our Time, and later rewritten and added to Hemingway's first American short story collection In Our Time, published by Boni & Liveright in 1925.

In the story, a World War I soldier and a nurse named "Luz" fall in love as she tends to him over the course of three months in the hospital. They decide to marry, but when the soldier returns home to the United States, he receives a letter from Luz with the news that she has fallen in love with an officer. Later she writes that she has not married, but the soldier ignores her. Shortly afterward, the soldier contracts gonorrhea from a sexual encounter in a taxi.

Hemingway based the story on his World War I affair with a nurse he met in Milan while recuperating in the hospital from leg injuries sustained at the Italian front.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Classics, Romance, School, American, Drama

2 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1924

About the author

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer and journalist. Best known for an economical, understated style that significantly influenced later 20th-century writers, he is often romanticized for his adventurous lifestyle, and outspoken and blunt public image. Most of Hemingway's works were published between the mid-1920s and mid-1950s, including seven novels, six short-story collections and two non-fiction works. His writings have become classics of American literature; he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature, while three of his novels, four short-story collections and three nonfiction works were published posthumously.
Hemingway was raised in Oak Park, Illinois. After high school, he spent six months as a cub reporter for The Kansas City Star before enlisting in the Red Cross. He served as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front in World War I and was seriously wounded in 1918. His wartime experiences formed the basis for his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms. He married Hadley Richardson in 1921, the first of four wives. They moved to Paris where he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star and fell under the influence of the modernist writers and artists of the 1920s' "Lost Generation" expatriate community. His debut novel The Sun Also Rises was published in 1926.
He divorced Richardson in 1927 and married Pauline Pfeiffer. They divorced after he returned from the Spanish Civil War, where he had worked as a journalist and which formed the basis for his 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martha Gellhorn became his third wife in 1940. He and Gellhorn separated after he met Mary Welsh Hemingway in London during World War II. Hemingway was present with Allied troops as a journalist at the Normandy landings and the liberation of Paris. He maintained permanent residences in Key West, Florida, in the 1930s and in Cuba in the 1940s and 1950s. On a 1954 trip to Africa, he was seriously injured in two plane accidents on successive days, leaving him in pain and ill health for much of the rest of his life. In 1959, he bought a house in Ketchum, Idaho, where, on July 2, 1961 (a couple weeks before his 62nd birthday), he killed himself using one of his shotguns.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Ernest Hemingway wrote some mighty short stories. Here are two vintage Hemingway - the shortest of his short stories. If you like these, you can look forward to plenty more.

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn."

Did Ernest Hemingway really write the above six-word story to win a bet? Perhaps, but what we know for sure is Ernest wrote the following six-word sequels:

For sale: baby shoes. Really big.
For hire: giant baby. Very amusing.
Rent baby for fun, scary evening.
Have you seen enormous baby? Escaped.
Please help. Huge baby at large.
Authorities warn: beware of monster baby.
Baby crushes pickup truck. Bare hands.
Gigantic baby terrorizes Greenville. Townspeople helpless.
Dick Prowdy reporting live: Baby Situation.
Cooing baby loves the ticklish tasers.
Oh, God. Oh, God. He’s growing.
Hostage taken. Baby on the move.
Playful baby delighted by military helicopters.
America transfixed by Greenville Baby Terror.
Wait, what’s happening? Baby slowing down.
Nap time. Reclining baby crushes Winnebago.
Sleepy baby trapped in net. Hooray!
National Guard drags snuggly baby home.
Now everything is back to normal.
Everything except for the house-sized baby.

A VERY SHORT STORY
One hot evening in Padua they carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Luz could hear them below on the balcony. Luz sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh in the hot night.

Luz stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table; and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the anaesthetic holding tight on to himself so he would not blab about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used to take the temperatures so Luz would not have to get up from the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Luz. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Luz in his bed.

Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they wanted everyone to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it.

Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night. After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarreled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.

He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordonone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had only been a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.

The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brief story about a soldier who falls in love with an Italian nurse, only for the nurse to outgrow their relationship and move onto someone else. While the length of the story does not allow for much character development, Hemingway still captures the sad, bittersweet feeling of separation after people grow apart and change. Within the context of war, he highlights a particular feeling of loss, if only for a fleeting moment.

[فؤاد · Rating 3 out of 5]

از اینجا می تونید ترجمه رو بخونید:
http://neoart.mihanblog.com/post/74

[Simona · Rating 2 out of 5]

Honestly? Only good if you are behind your yearly reading Challenge.

[Terry · Rating 2 out of 5]

Worthy of a very short review. Meh. 🪖🧑🏻‍⚕️

[Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this with an advanced regret because I knew that after the first page it'll end in the next. Seven paragraphs of reasonable length. Less than a minute read, if you read fast. Yet it contains a lot, like it was that pinprick of light, or condensed energy, before the Big Bang which became the universe we now know.

[Hadil Dahia · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have not enjoyed it, not even a little bit.

[مومنہ❀]

When You have your exams tomorrow but REALLY want to READ something¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

[Stephen Alff (AlffBooks) · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 star: I did not like this book, either terrible storyline, morally unacceptable or because I just did not enjoy reading the book at all.

This story just wasn't interesting in any way. Nothing at all in it that stood out, and the ideas themselves were just dull. A one star rating is something I usually avoid giving but honestly this doesn't deserve any more than one star. I don't have anything else to say about this story.

[Kevin]

I liked it; one page long and I still get credit for reading another book, making me look smart.

[Ahmad Odeh Alzawahreh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think it would be my last short story to read from this collection of Hemingway's stories.
I have read more than ten stories and he doesn not convice me as a very good writer.
What's this ! I noticed that he just wants to write anything. Some of his stories was good but nothing special.
Other short story writers like Chekhov, Allan poe and Mopassant made me really astonished after the first reading.

[Susie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like a proto-Farewell to Arms

[Ece Kapılar · Rating 3 out of 5]

the bittersweetness of love & loss 🤧

[Athénaïs🎀 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m never getting over this and the fact that it’s based on his own life. 1 page and it ended me tf

[Viji (Bookish endeavors) · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first time I am giving such a low rating for Hemingway. But what to do.! I was thoroughly bored with the story. It might have the presentation style to its advantage,being written by an author of class. But it had huge holes in the plot. It is a very short story like the title says and you can try it for yourself to see the point.

[Vaishali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stark, poignant, and dry.
Yuck ... Hemingway.

[lv]

look. it counts

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hemingway’s A Very Short Story compresses an entire romantic tragedy into a handful of pages, demonstrating his belief that emotional devastation does not require narrative abundance. The story is brief, unsentimental, and quietly brutal.

As a romantic work, it strips love of illusion and exposes how easily intimacy can collapse under the pressure of time, distance, and unequal emotional investment.

The story centres on an unnamed American soldier wounded in Italy during World War I and his relationship with a nurse, Luz. Their love begins in proximity—hospital rooms, shared vulnerability, physical closeness.

Hemingway establishes intimacy not through declaration but through circumstance. Love arises because war temporarily suspends ordinary life, intensifying emotion while disguising fragility.

When the soldier is sent away to recuperate, romance enters its most dangerous phase: separation. Hemingway’s treatment of distance is unsparing. Letters replace touch; intention replaces presence.

Luz writes that she loves him but insists on waiting until marriage to consummate their relationship��a detail that introduces tension between desire and idealism. The soldier accepts this arrangement with a faith that feels naïve rather than noble.

What follows is one of Hemingway’s coldest revelations. Luz grows tired of waiting, falls in love with another man, and abruptly ends the relationship by letter.

The tone is matter-of-fact, almost bureaucratic. There is no cruelty in her language—only indifference. Romance does not end with betrayal, but with emotional withdrawal.

Hemingway refuses consolation. The soldier, later attempting to recover emotionally, contracts gonorrhoea in a taxi ride in Chicago. This ending is not merely ironic; it is thematic. Love, idealised and deferred, gives way to meaningless physicality. The story suggests that romantic purity, when divorced from lived reality, often collapses into disillusionment.

What makes A Very Short Story remarkable as a romantic text is its refusal to assign villainy. Luz is not demonised; she simply changes.

The soldier is not heroic; he is passive. Romance fails not because of malice, but because of imbalance. One person moves on while the other remains emotionally stationary.

Stylistically, Hemingway’s restraint is devastating. Sentences are simple, declarative, and emotionally opaque. The absence of commentary forces the reader to confront the emotional facts without mediation.

Romance here is not exalted—it is exposed as temporary, contingent, and vulnerable to circumstance.

The story endures because it tells a truth many romantic narratives avoid: that love born in intensity does not guarantee endurance.

Hemingway shows how quickly idealised affection can erode once it is removed from its originating context. A Very Short Story is romantic not because it celebrates love, but because it mourns its fragility with ruthless honesty.

Most recommended.

[Classic reverie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hemingway's "A Very Short Story" is about romance, love and the war. A soldier and a nurse romancing in Italy.


Highlight (Yellow) | Page 107
Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they were married, but they
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 107
wanted every one to know about it, and to make it so they could not lose it. Luz wrote him many letters that he never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch to the front and he sorted them by the dates and read them all straight through. They were all about the hospital, and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him and how terrible it was missing him at night. After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 107
they might be married. Luz would not come home until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or any one in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padua to Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they had to say good-bye, in the station at Milan, they kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.

❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert

Not having read "Farwell to Arms" yet but hearing about the nurse that Hemingway met in the war and the novel being based on that. This short story seems to be another version from reality also.

Highlight (Yellow) | Page 108
He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Luz went back to Pordenone to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living in the muddy, rainy town in the winter, the major of the battalion made love to Luz, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive her, and be
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 108
grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best. The major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Luz never got an answer to the letter to Chicago about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl in a loop department store
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 108
while riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.

[celine !]

[ yes / no / maybe ]

yes!

The simplicity in Hemingway's writing may initially seem dull or emotionless, prompting readers to question whenever it can be considered a ”great” story. However, by maintaining a neutral narrative voice, Hemingway transforms tone into the story’s main expressive force. The tone becomes the story, revealing emotion, not thought description but through absence and seemingly passive observation. His choice of using very few adjectives is a clever way to mimic the soldier's postwar numbness. There is an absence of emotional warmth and intimacy in the narrator’s voice and lack of expressed emotion itself conveys the soldier's inner emptiness. The soldier's attempts at connection suggest he seeks comfort rather than romantic fulfillment, allowing pursuers experience emptiness and longing that he himself feels.
The narrator is never assigned a name, therefore referred to solely as the soldier: a deliberate choice that accentuates his anonymity. By removing personal identifiers, Hemingway highlights the way trauma can strip individuals of identity, leaving them defined by absence rather than presence.

[Lia · Rating 1 out of 5]

First read this truly very short story at university. I haven’t really understood its point then and I don’t really understand it now. Maybe an experiment in how short a short story can get. Possibly inspired by Hemingway’s romance with Agnes von Kurowsky – the nurse who was the prototype of Luz in the story. Hemingway’s stories often have a tone of pessimism and bleakness, quite unlike the vitality of his autobiographical “A Moving Feast”. Perhaps Hemingway himself couldn’t decide between the two approaches – fighting for happiness or being pessimistic because of the impossibility of making it last forever.

[Madison · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a good classroom text, especially in the writing unit/creative writing. Short, easy to understand but it has a lot of depth in it. Seven paragraphs is plenty of space to tell of heartbreak and moving on. Hemingway says a lot with few words.

The actual story is ehh, i don't like the title or how you don't know one of the main characters names and there's no personality in either of the characters.

[Darinda · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read in The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories.

A soldier falls for his nurse. They have big plans, but their love does not last.

[Firefox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quiet short indeed as the name tells, but hardly any brevity be seen, yet rather plain and mediocre; moreover,the ending is too abrupt and sudden. No better than most short stories, and really does not deserve the reputation it has.

[a.d. nox · Rating 3 out of 5]

i read this short story for my college english class—a short story about how life is unfair. love to lose to lose some more. the story has some less obvious bits like how she was pregnant:/ tons of “expected, absolutely unexpectedly” bits. it was pretty good tho.

[Mary Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

did i read this because i was behind on my yearly goal? maybe
but did i enjoy it? yes
even though it is an incredibly short 2 pages, it manages to convey so much about life and love and relationships in just 6 paragraphs

[Lyra Goga · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hemingway fictionalizes his own love story. With this awareness, and because the story was awfully bland, I loved when the male protagonist got dumped by his lover just before the promise of marriage. She chose an Italian man instead. Well done, Luz!

[TopBob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hemingway's style is effective here. In the few words expressed between the soldier and Luz there is an understatement in her despair. Of course, Hemingway aptly points out that separation can kill even the most passionate of loves.

[Larissa Granato · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first read for college and I have to reread it probably a lot more to make an analysis but y'know... could be better but could also be worse.

[Sophia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this in Mandarin during my Chinese class. It is a story of unreciprocated love- the plot has potential, but falls short with its lack of emotion.