We don’t know for sure where the fact came from, but with some of the other stories we’re looking at today, the origin for the fact is the funniest part…
Ernest Hemingway Never Wrote ‘For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn’
The Story: Ernest Hemingway, he of famously sparse prose, was having lunch one time with several writers. The man had written The Old Man and the Sea in a hundred-odd pages, and he could be much briefer than that if he chose, he claimed. He bet he could write an entire story in just six words. The others at the table took him up on that bet, and Hemingway wrote the following on a napkin: “For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.” The other men paid up.
The Truth: No sources from when Hemingway was alive describe the bet. If he did make it and won with this story, it was a story he hadn’t composed but which had been floating around for decades. The earliest published account that Snopes could find of the bet came in the 1990s, within the lifetime of many people reading this. A 1990s play about Hemingway mentioned the bet, and it may have taken the anecdote from a recent writers’ guide called Get Published! Get Produced!: A Literary Agent’s Tips on How to Sell Your Writing.
via Snopes.com
The baby shoes story existed in various forms when Hemingway was just a boy. In the 1910s and 1920s, some versions substituted in “baby carriage, never used.” In 1917, a guide to short fiction suggested a hypothetical story called “Little Shoes, Never Worn.” This guide suggested that as the title, not the whole story, but it could have functioned as either. Since it’s already phrased as an advertisement, it would go without saying that the shoes were for sale, so this wording actual beat not-Hemingway’s, covering the entire narrative in just four words.