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Ernest Hemingway’s brief legacy on Twitter

Six-word-story phenomenon lives anew.

 

Fernando Alfonso III

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Posted on Nov 2, 2011   Updated on Jun 3, 2021, 1:43 am CDT

Ernest Hemingway penned some of the greatest American novels ever written, “The Old Man and the Sea,” “The Sun Also Rises,” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

But it was this six-word tale that he was most proud of, reported Wired Magazine in 2006.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

That exact same story has been tweeted more than three dozen times as part of #6wordstories, a worldwide trending topic that has been mentioned more than 28,000 times in the last eight hours, according to statistics from Topsy, a social-media search engine.

It’s not yet clear why the six-word-story phenomenon, which seemed to crest in 2008 with the release of the book Six-Word Memoirs, is resurging. Smith Magazine, a website which specializes in collecting these ultrashort stories, has a new book, The Moment, coming out next year—but it’s not limited to the six-word format.

Here are some of the other stories that grabbed our attention.

Photo by Mr. Velocipede

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*First Published: Nov 2, 2011, 3:48 pm CDT