Cat in the Rain
short story by Ernest Hemingway
"Cat in the Rain" is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), first published by Boni & Liveright in 1925 in the short story collection In Our Time. The story is about an American husband and wife on vacation in Italy. Critical attention focuses chiefly on its autobiographical elements and on Hemingway's "theory of omission" (iceberg theory).
Background
According to the book Hemingway's Cats, Hemingway wrote the story as a tribute to his wife Hadley. The couple had only been married a few years and lived in Paris, where she was often left alone for hours at a time while her husband worked. She asked for a cat, but he told her they were too poor. When she became pregnant, he wrote "Cat in the Rain," apparently based on an incident in Rapallo (where they visited Ezra Pound in 1923). Hadley found a stray kitten and said, "I want a cat ... I want a cat. I want a cat now.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 4, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1520063. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1899, 1961, 1925 and 1923.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cat in the Rain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.