magazine editor-in-chief Ray Long praised "Fifty Grand", calling it, "one of the best short stories that ever came to my hands...the best prize-fight story I ever read...a remarkable piece of realism." However, some critics—among them Wilson Lee Dodd, whose article entitled "Simple Annals of the Callous" appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature—found Hemingway's subjects lacking. Joseph Wood Krutch called the stories in Men Without Women "Sordid little catastrophes" involving "very vulgar people." Hemingway responded to the less favorable reviews with a poem published in The Little Review in May 1929: <poem> Valentine (For a Mr. Lee Wilson Dodd and Any of His Friends Who Want It) Sing a song of critics pockets full of lye four and twenty critics hope that you will die hope that you will peter out hope that you will fail so they can be the first one be the first to hail any happy weakening or sign of quick decay. (All very much alike, weariness too great, sordid small catastrophes, stack the cards on fate, very vulgar people, annals of the callous, dope fiends, soldiers, prostitutes, men without a gallus)</poem> Hemingway's style, on the other hand, received much acclaim. In the New York Times Book Review, Percy Hutchinson praised him for "language sheered to the bone, colloquial language expended with the utmost frugality; but it is continuous and the effect is one of continuously gathering power." Even Krutch, writing in the Nation in 1927, said of Men Without Women'', "It appears to be the most meticulously literal reporting and yet it reproduces dullness without being dull." References External links Fifty Grand 1927 short stories Short stories by Ernest Hemingway New Jersey in fiction Boxing culture Boxing in the United States