hand as he pummels Jack's torso. After the eleventh round John Collins tells Jack the fight will go to Walcott, but Jack says he thinks he can last through the twelfth round and goes to meet Walcott and "finish it off right to please himself." Walcott backs Jack up against the ropes and delivers a very low blow; Jack, in obvious pain, stays standing–"if he went down, there go fifty thousand bucks" because he would win on a foul–and tells the referee not to call the foul because it must have been an accident. He walks toward the dumbfounded Walcott and begins swinging, landing several body punches before hitting his opponent twice below the belt. Walcott falls and wins the match on a foul. Back in the dressing room, Jack comments, "It's funny how fast you can think when it means that much money." John says, "You're some boy, Jack." "No," Jack replies. "It was nothing." Background and publication history Story Years before writing "Fifty Grand", Hemingway wrote a boxing story which appeared in the April 1916 edition of Oak Park High School's literary magazine Tabula. This story, called "A Matter of Colour", was more obviously comical than "Fifty Grand", but the two bear several similarities, such as a non-protagonist narrator and a "trickster out-tricked" theme. Though authors today seldom write about boxing, stories like "Fifty Grand" were common and popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. For example, George Bernard Shaw's Cashel Byron's Profession, written in 1882 but not popular until about 20 years later, featured a prizefighter as its protagonist (though Shaw said the fight scenes in the novel were supposed to turn the public away from boxing). Jack London's "A Piece of Steak" was published in the Saturday Evening Post in November 1909. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote several stories about boxing, such as Rodney Stone and The Croxley Master, and made his famous Sherlock Holmes an amateur boxer. Octavus Roy Cohen's "Last Blow", published on 2 October 1926 issue of Colliers, appeared the year before "Fifty Grand" and P. G. Wodehouse's "The Debut of Battling Billson" found a place in both Strand and Cosmopolitan in 1923, being published on both sides of the Atlantic. "Fifty Grand" thus fit into an established genre. Weeks writes, "Once The Sun Also Rises was sent off to the publisher, Hemingway wrote in his notebook in early 1926