No Money for the Kingbird

ONE of the first stories Ernest Hemingway ever published, in his high school literary magazine, was about boxing.' It was a very slick story-slick, that is, in the sense that its plot was an 0. Henry twist and its punch line an old vaudeville gag-and it included a great deal of genteel and literary language, but its principal interest today is in its juxtaposition, at one point, of the words amateur and professional. Professionalism has always been very important to Hemingway. He is a man with a high sense of craft. During Hemingway's adolescence, for example, it was completely natural that a boy who was both big for his age and interested in things that required skill should turn to boxing rather than, say, to collecting merit badges or mastering baseball. Every town in America had it gym and its stable of aspiring pugs. The Chicago sports pages gave a great deal of space to Gunboat Smith and Jack Johnson and Philadelphia Jack O'Brien. It was the era of the great Search for A

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