SOURCE: “‘A Man of the World’ and ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’: Hemingway's Unified View of Old Age,” in The Hemingway Review, Vol. 13, No. 2, Spring, 1974, pp. 62-73.

In the following essay, Leonard considers the common thematic concerns of Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and “A Man of the World.”

Scholars and critics lately have put to good use the companion pieces among Ernest Hemingway's short fiction. Susan Beegel has achieved insights into “The Undefeated” and “A Lack of Passion” from side-by-side analysis of these two antithetical companion stories. Robert Fleming, in “Dismantling the Code: Hemingway's ‘A Man of the World,’” opens up the riches of that short story when he aligns it with “The Undefeated” and “Fifty Grand” by interpreting all three narratives as “structured around ‘code heroes’”(6). By comparing “A Man of the World” with “The Battler,” “The Killers,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Fleming...