that he wanted to write short stories 'for four or five months,'" and "Fifty Grand" was one of the results. In its original version, "Fifty Grand" opened with Jack answering a question about how he beat Benny Leonard. Jack says, "Well you see Benny's an awful smart boxer. All the time he's in there he's thinking and all the time he's thinking I was hitting him," and the subsequent two and a half pages led into the story as it now exists. F. Scott Fitzgerald had urged Hemingway to submit "Fifty Grand" for publication, but the editor at Scribner's requested that Hemingway shorten the story. Hemingway, unable to remove anything from the story, allowed writer Manuel Komroff to cut it for him, but found his efforts unsatisfactory. The story finally appeared in the July 1927 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, under Ellery Sedgwick's owner-editorship, after Fitzgerald persuaded Hemingway to remove the first three pages, arguing that the Britton-Leonard fight they alluded to was too well known. Hemingway later resented Fitzgerald for this advice and scrawled on one of the typescripts of "Fifty Grand": "1st 3 pages of story mutilated by Scott Fitzgerald with his [undecipherable]." Inspirations Many scholars have searched for the inspiration behind this story in actual boxing matches Hemingway would have known of or attended. According to Philip G. and Rosemary R. Davies, Hemingway seems to have based the story on the 1 November 1922 welterweight championship fight between Jack Britton and Mickey Walker. Though Hemingway was traveling from Constantinople to Paris when the fight took place, "The use of similar or identical names for the characters and the stress on Brennan's age show the resemblance between the short story and actual circumstances", and Hemingway could have gleaned many of these details from newspapers. James J. Martine disagrees, however, writing that "the fictional Jack Brennan–Jimmy Walcott fight is an amalgamation of at least two real-life bouts", and arguing that Hemingway was simply "presenting the times" by writing of common occurrences such as fouls and attempted fixes, whatever influence the Britton–Walker fight may have had. He offers another possible influence, the Battling Siki–Georges Carpentier light heavyweight championship match of September 24, 1922. This fight, unlike the Britton–Walker bout, ended with a foul when Siki was clearly about to win the fight, an outcome which "started the hundreds of Americans at ringside to shouting 'robber.'" Martine adds, "If a man