SOURCE: “A Note on a New Manuscript of ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in The Hemingway Review, Vol. VIII, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 36-9.

In the following essay, Smith heralds a typescript version of Hemingway's story, known as the “Delaware typescript.”

Some three years have passed since the last article on the controversy over the two waiters' dialogue in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In March 1985 David Kerner returned to the argument he had entered in 1979, bringing further evidence—almost an anthology—of instances of “anti-metronomic dialogue,” including several from Hemingway himself, to argue that the text of the story should be restored to its original form. From its first publication in Scribner's Magazine (March 1933) to 1965, the crucial lines of dialogue read:

[Younger Waiter] “His niece looks after him.”

[Older Waiter] “I know. You said she cut him down.”

The inconsistency in that dialogue—earlier the Older Waiter has said “His...