SOURCE: “The Contentious Emendation of Hemingway's ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,’” in The Hemingway Review, Vol. 18, Fall, 1998, p. 78.

In the following essay, Ryan maintains that Scribner's 1965 emendation of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is invalid and should be retracted.

For nearly forty years, a war of words has been waged, the battlefield being a short passage of dialogue in Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” originally published in Scribner's Magazine in March 1933 and reprinted in the short story collection Winner Take Nothing in October of the same year. The battle has revolved around an apparent inconsistency in dialogue with relation to the identifies of the story's two now-famous waiters. The discrepancy seemed to go unnoticed for nearly twenty-six years, until February 1959, when articles by F. P. Kroeger and William Colburn sparked the conflict. In 1965, Charles Scribner Jr. emended the original text, thus “correcting” the inconsistency, but with the unfortunate side-effect of...