A Clean, Well-Lighted Place Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William B. Bache

Critical Essay by William B. Bache

SOURCE: “Craftsmanship in ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in The Personalist, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1, January, 1956, pp. 60-4.

In the following essay, Bache contends that “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is “valuable both as a comment on and as a representation of Hemingway's craftsmanship and insight.”

At first glance the short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”¹ by Ernest Hemingway may seem slight; yet if it is slight, it is so only in length and not by any other standard. The intrinsic value of the story has been well recognized by Mark Schorer, who has said of it: “‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’ is not only a short story, it is a model of the short story, with all the virtues that attend it as a genre singularly lighted.”² The importance of the story, moreover, not so much for itself as for its place within the corpus of Hemingway's fiction, has been noted...
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