For sale: baby shoes, never worn

A six-word story regarding a pair of baby shoes is considered an extreme example of flash fiction.

This May 16, 1910 article from The Spokane Press recounts an earlier advertisement that struck the author as particularly tragic.

"For sale: baby shoes, never worn." is a six-word story, one of the most famous examples of flash fiction. Versions of the story date back to the early 1900s, and it was being reproduced and expanded upon within a few years of its initial publication.

The story is popularly misattributed to Ernest Hemingway; this is implausible, as versions of the story first appeared in 1906, when Hemingway was 7 years old, and it was first attributed to him in 1991, 30 years after his death; see § Claim for details.

Setting

The story is in the form of a classified ad, and suggests a larger narrative involving pregnancy loss, sudden infant death, or abandoned plans for a child.

History

Examples of classified ads reading "For sale: baby carriage, never used" date back to as early as 1883. The May 16, 1910, edition of The Spokane Press had an article titled "Tragedy of Baby's Death is Revealed in Sale of Clothes."

In 1917, William R. Kane published a piece in a periodical called The Editor where he outlined the basic idea of a grief-stricken woman who had lost her baby and even suggested the title of Little Shoes, Never Worn. In his version of the story, the shoes are being given away rather than sold. He suggests that this would provide some measure of solace for the owner, as it would mean that another baby would at least benefit directly.

By 1921, the story was already being parodied: the July issue of Judge that year published a version that used a baby carriage instead of shoes; there, however, the narrator described contacting the seller to offer condolences, only to be told that the sale was due to the birth of twins rather than of a single child.

Claim

The earliest known connection to Hemingway was in 1991, thirty years after the author's death. The claim of Hemingway's authorship originates in an unsubstantiated anecdote about a wager among him and other writers. Hemingway is said to have claimed he could write a short story only six words long. This attribution was in a book by Peter Miller called Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent's Tips on How to Sell Your Writing. He said he was told the story by a "well-established newspaper syndicator" in 1974. In a 1991 letter to Canadian humorist John Robert Colombo, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke recounts: "He's [Hemingway] supposed to have won a $10 bet (no small sum in the '20s) from his fellow writers. They paid up without a word. ... Here it is. I still can't think of it without crying— FOR SALE. BABY SHOES. NEVER WORN."

This connection to Hemingway was reinforced by a one-man play called Papa by John De Groot, which debuted in 1996. Set during a Life magazine photo session in 1959, De Groot has the character utter the phrase as a means of illustrating Hemingway's brevity. In Playbill, De Groot defended his portrayal of Hemingway by saying, "Everything in the play is based on events as described by Ernest Hemingway, or those who knew him well. Whether or not these things actually happened is something we'll never know truly. But Hemingway and many others claimed they did."

Legacy

Telling a story in very few words was dubbed flash fiction in 1992. The six-word limit in particular has spawned the concept of Six-Word Memoirs, including a collection published in book form in 2008 by Smith Magazine, and two sequels published in 2009.

See also

• Iceberg theory
• Minimalism