A Café is a Very Different Thing: Hemingway's Café as Church and Home

This essay explores the significance of the café in Hemingway's writing and argues that it has particular value as an idealized site, which connects it to familiar themes in his work such as conduct and behavior. Indeed, there exists such a thing as the perfect café, a supernal establishment, which seems to instantiate many of the principles, sentiments, practices, and virtues that we might associate with that famous paradigm of conduct in Hemingway studies, the Hemingway code.