Many literary analysts have noted the connection of “The End of Something” to events in Hemingway's life. In Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story, Carlos Baker notes that Hemingway had “a brief romance with Marjorie Bump, at Horton Bay in the summer of 1919.” H.R. Stoneback provided an explanation for the autobiographical elements of the story in his essay “'Nothing was ever lost': Another Look at 'That Marge Business'". Stoneback claimed that “Marge and Hemingway met long before the summer of 1919.” According to Stoneback, Marjorie came to Horton Bay to visit her uncle, Professor Ernest L. Ohle of Washington University in St. Louis, who had his summer cottage there.” William Ohle in “How it was in Horton Bay” explained that Hemingway and Marge met in 1915 when Marge “was walking back from the creek to her uncle’s house, a speckled trouth on a stringer in one hand and a long cane pole in the other.” Bernice Kert described Marge as “softly vulnerable and good-natured, the right degree of woman for Ernest.” Stoneback disdained such quaint descriptions of the real-life Marjorie. He claimed that the “competence, skill, discipline, humility, pride, and poise” shown by Marge in the story reflected the Marjorie Hemingway knew. Analysis According to Lisa Tyler, the opening description "represents a vivid (if disturbing) metaphor for the relationship Nick and Marjorie share,” and Paul Smith claims the use of a descriptive and symbolic introduction is rather common in writing, but this does not reduce the introduction's usefulness in conveying the state of Marjorie and Nick's relationship at the beginning of the story. In “False Wilderness”, Frederic Svoboda emphasizes the significance of the description of the old lumber town, writing that “Horton Bay in Hemingway’s time was hardly the ghost town of “The End of Something”. While the lumber mills indeed had moved away... the village was not abandoned. It was rather a small summer resort.” Laura Gruber Godfrey agrees that “The End of Something” shows “the careful interweaving of human characters with their communities and their landscapes.” In losing the mill, the town lost the linchpin that held it together, so when Nick and Marjorie row by ten years later, “there was nothing of the mill left except the broken white limestone of its foundations.” Tyler writes that Nick's behavior towards Marjorie can be compared with loggers in Michigan, that “Nick, like the loggers, is all too aware of