A Café is a very Different Thing: Hemingway’s Café as Church and Home

This essay discusses Hemingway's apparent high regard for the café and the impact it has upon his life and writing. With reference to the short story 'A Clean, Well-lighted Place', his novel, The Sun Also Rises, as well as his letters and journalism, it argues that the café has particular value as an idealized site, which connects it to familiar themes in his work such as conduct and behaviour. Indeed, there exists such a thing as the perfect café, a supernal establishment, which seems to instantiate many of the principles, sentiments, practices, and virtues that we might associate with that famous paradigm of conduct in Hemingway studies, the Hemingway code.

Published with permission from The Hemingway Review