Story of the Week: The End of Something

Sunday, July 19, 2026

The End of Something

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)

From Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926

Interesting Links

"Ernest Hemingway in Michigan" (Clarke Historical Library, Central Michigan University)

Video: "The Genius of Hemingway: A conversation with Robert W. Trogdon, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein" (LOA Live)

Previous Story of the Week selections

• "The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife," Ernest Hemingway

• "The Sensible Thing," F. Scott Fitzgerald

• "A Shameful Affair," Kate Chopin

• "Atrophy," Edith Wharton

Buy the book

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises & Other Writings 1918–1926

in our time (1924) | In Our Time (1925) | The Torrents of Spring | The Sun Also Rises | journalism | letters | 863 pages

List price: $35.00

Web Store price: $28.00

Leaping Trout, 1889. Watercolor over graphite by American painter Winslow Homer (1836–1910). The Cleveland Museum of Art.<br>We will never know what exactly was in the letter Ernest Hemingway sent in February 1921 to Marjorie Bump; much later in life, she destroyed all the correspondence she had received from him over the years. But he received a stinging response:

The long delay in writing was caused by the fact that I have been trying to decide just how your remark, that you were good for me, could be justified. Two months consideration has failed to show any point where you have been greatly beneficial. . . . I see it was wrong to think highly of a person of such abomnable conceit, but it did seem queer that you should still hold the idea that you were good for me. As for the phrase you seem so fond of, "a phase in every girl’s life," I prefer the idea that it never existed.

Taken aback, Hemingway worked up a draft of a defensive and mocking reply to "Red" (one of his nicknames for her). The document, in the Hemingway archives, is repetitive and heavily revised, with entire passages crossed out, and the letter was almost certainly never sent. Part of it reads:

Abominable is not spelled Abomnable.

That should show, without 2 month’s consideration, how I’ve been good for you. Was joking about that you know Red.

Wonder what the grand outburst was about anyway. Suppose I’ll never know. What’s the stuff about conceit? Am I really so doggone conceited?

Was going to write you a sarcastic letter — but don’t feel like it now. Got started remembering that summer of 1919— Best I’ve ever had summer there ever was I guess— Not going to spoil that summer or fall for anybody. It was idyllic — perfect as some days in Spring are and mountain valleys you pass on puffing trains — and other impermanent things.

Afterward you reverted to type and I acted like a cad — and it all came out right. . . .

Ernest and Marjorie first met during their summer vacation in Horton Bay, Michigan, in 1915, and she became a close friend of his sisters. During the summer of 1919, after he returned from the war in Europe, they began dating. That July he turned 20 years old; she turned 18 the following month and would be a high school senior in the nearby town of Petoskey in the fall. "Ernest played the part of a wiser brother, giving me advice on trout fishing such as cutting and skinning perch bait, trolling, and dropping my line at the exact right time for a successful catch," Bump later told her daughter, Georgianna Main. "Many times we spent evenings together at the Point and built driftwood campfires while we waited for fish to bite."

During the fall of 1920, before Hemingway left Michigan to work in Toronto, the couple ended their relationship but remained friendly: "I got to thinking about you today and of the good times we have had," she wrote to him the following summer. "You were the best all around pal I have ever known." Yet one of Hemingway’s closest friends, William B. Smith Jr., thought Marjorie was wrong for Ernest, and he was apparently open in his disapproval. When she was in college, Bump wrote to Hemingway, "I guess I’d have to try to stop liking Bill. It’s rather difficult to try to keep on liking a person who extremely dislikes in return."

The paragraphs above outline the basic autobiographical "facts" that inspired two of Hemingway’s better-known Nick Adams stories: "The End of Something" and "The Three-Day Blow," both of which were published in 1925. Hemingway, however, used Marjorie and Bill’s real names in his fictional accounts of their summer together, an act Marjorie increasingly lamented as the years went by:

It has remained a deep hurt for all my long life because Ernest painted a false picture of me under my real name. . . . It made me so upset that I was never at all comfortable about going back to Petoskey, Michigan, where people knew the real Marge. I felt humiliated to be the object of their pity when they read about me as a young lady to whom Nick [as Ernest] had spoken these words about our relationship: "It isn’t fun anymore."

Perhaps worse for...