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Certain anecdotes about notable figures continue to be told and retold as true — whether they actually are true or not — because they so perfectly encapsulate quintessential aspect of the persons they're told about. One such anecdote clings to author Ernest Hemingway, a tale of a six-word-long story he supposedly authored that, in its terseness, seems to be a perfect encapsulation of not just Hemingway's economic writing style but also of the man himself: A question that has bedeviled many Hemingway fans is: Which is the literary fiction — the six-word story itself, or the claim that Hemingway wrote such a story? Two curious elements of the baby shoes tale are that no one seems to have been able to locate an original source or publication that establishes Hemingway's authorship of the story, and that the tale itself (i.e., the claim that Hemingway wrote such a story) apparently doesn't go back much further than the 1990s. An explanation we believe accounts for both these elements is that the six-word-story originated not with Hemingway himself, but with Papa, a one-man play about Hemingway which was written by John deGroot and debuted in 1996. As the New York Daily News noted in a May 1996 review of Papa: Unfortunately, as the Hemingway Review noted, the nature of the source material which deGroot drew upon in crafting Papa doesn't lend itself to verification: One interesting coincidence we've uncovered is (an almost certainly unrelated) non-literary antecedent for this tale, one which appeared in the Miscellaneous Items for Sale classified ad column of a Tucson newspaper in 1945: On a concluding note, we observe that the Hemingway legend bears a passing resemblance to a familiar urban legend about a student who utilizes similar brevity in acing an essay assignment.
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