A Day's Wait

Short story by Ernest Hemingway

"A Day's Wait"
Short story by Ernest Hemingway
Publication
Published in	The Snows of Kilimanjaro
Publication date	1933

"A Day's Wait" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway published in his 1933 short story collection Winner Take Nothing, which portrays a young boy's reaction to becoming ill.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

Plot

The story is narrated in first person by the father, who calls his boy Schatz (German, meaning darling).^[5] When the boy gets a fever, a doctor prescribes three medicines and tells the boy's father that his temperature is 102 degrees. The boy is quiet and does not listen when his father reads to him Howard Pyle's book about pirates. Later, when the father returns from hunting game, the boy asks when he will die. He had believed his temperature to be lethal because he heard in France (where Celsius is used) that one cannot live with a temperature over 44 degrees. When the father explains to him the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius, the boy relaxes. The next day, "he cried very easily at little things that were of no importance."

Reception

Sheldon Norman Grebstein Junior said Hemingway handled "a potentially sentimental situation without expressing feeling in overt terms and without calling directly upon the reader's sense of pathos. We surmise the father's love and concern for his sick son not from any declaration of it in exposition or dialogue but rather from a series of observations, gestures and dramatic metaphors".^[6]

This story is very close to the one by Amicis "From the Apennines to the Andys", in his book "Heart". There, a little Italian boy has adventures while trying to find his mom who went to Argentina to work, to help the family finances. The boy gets sick and is sure he'd die when he hears that his temperature is over 100. The book was published in 1886.

References

^ "A Day´s Wait by Ernest Hemingway". gs.cidsnet.de. Archived from the original on 2005-12-21. Retrieved 27 December 2013.
^ Striker, Jonet. "The Short Story Elements In A Day's Wait". articlesnatch.com. Archived from the original on 28 December 2013. Retrieved 27 December 2013.
^ Cearley, Valery Faye Thomson. Exploring connections in Ernest Hemingway's "A day's wait". worlcat.org. OCLC 50542423.
^ "A Day's Wait". litmed.med.nyu.edu. Retrieved 27 December 2013.
^ Stafford, N. E. (1999). Piggott, Arkansas (ed.). "'A Day's Wait'". Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. 30 (2): 139 – via EBSCO.
^ Beegel, S. F. (1993). "Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates and male taciturnity in Hemingway's 'A Day's Wait'". Studies in Short Fiction. 30 (4): 535.^{[dead link]}

Ernest Hemingway

Bibliography

Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
To Have and Have Not (1937)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Nonfiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932)
Green Hills of Africa (1935)

Posthumous

A Moveable Feast (1964)
Islands in the Stream (1970)
The Dangerous Summer (1985)
The Garden of Eden (1986)
True at First Light (1999)
Under Kilimanjaro (2005)

Short stories

"Up In Michigan" (1921)
"Indian Camp" (1924)
"The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife" (1925)
"The End of Something" (1925)
"The Three-Day Blow" (1925)
"The Battler" (1925)
"A Very Short Story" (1925)
"Soldier's Home" (1925)
"The Revolutionist" (1925)
"Mr. and Mrs. Elliot" (1925)
"Cat in the Rain" (1925)
"Out of Season" (1925)
"Cross Country Snow" (1925)
"My Old Man" (1925)
"Big Two-Hearted River" (1925)
"Banal Story" (1926)
"Today is Friday" (1926)
"A Canary for One" (1927)
"Fifty Grand" (1927)
"Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
"The Killers" (1927)
"The Undefeated" (1927)
"Che Ti Dice La Patria?" (1927)
"In Another Country" (1927)
"Now I Lay Me" (1927)
"A Simple Enquiry" (1927)
"Ten Indians" (1927)
"An Alpine Idyll" (1927)
"A Pursuit Race" (1927)
"On the Quai at Smyrna" (1930)
"Fathers and Sons" (1932)
"A Natural History of the Dead" (1932)
"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" (1933)
"A Day's Wait" (1933)
"The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" (1933)
"A Way You'll Never Be" (1933)
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" (1936)
"The Capital of the World" (1936)
"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (1936)
"Old Man at the Bridge" (1938)

Short story
collections

Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
In Our Time (1925)
Men Without Women (1927)
Winner Take Nothing (1933)
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1961)
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War (1969)
The Nick Adams Stories (1972)
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (1987)
Ernest Hemingway: The Collected Stories (1995)

Story fragments

"On Writing"

Poetry

88 Poems (1979)
Complete Poems

Plays

Today is Friday (1926)
The Fifth Column (1938)

Screenplays

The Spanish Earth (1937 film)

Letters and
journalism

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (1967)
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 (1981)
Dateline: Toronto (1985)
The Cambridge Edition of the Letters of Ernest Hemingway (2011)

Adaptations

The Sun Also Rises	1957 film 1984 film Opera The Select (The Sun Also Rises) Ballet
"The Killers"	1946 film 1956 film 1964 film Bukowski short story
A Farewell to Arms	1932 film 1957 film 1966 TV series
To Have and Have Not	1944 film The Breaking Point (1950) The Gun Runners (1958) Captain Khorshid (1987)
For Whom the Bell Tolls	1943 film 1959 TV play 1965 TV series 1984 song
The Old Man and the Sea	1958 film 1990 film 1999 animated film
Other film adaptations	The Macomber Affair (1947) Under My Skin (1950) The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (1962) Islands in the Stream (1977) Soldier's Home (1977) My Old Man (1979) After the Storm (2001) The Garden of Eden (2008) Across the River and into the Trees (2022)