"Cat in the Rain" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

, written while the author was living in France. It was first published in 1925 in the short story collection In Our Time

In Our Time (book)

In Our Time is the first collection of short stories by Ernest Hemingway published by Boni & Liveright in New York in 1925, after a smaller edition of the book, titled in our time, had been published in Paris in 1924...

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In the story an American couple take a vacation to Italy. While at their hotel the woman sees a cat and the story progresses from there. During the story it is made obvious that the couple's relationship is going sour. Hemingway uses the cat stuck in the rain with nobody to care for it to symbolize the wife who longs to be loved. Hemingway claims in a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. Fitzgerald is considered a member of the "Lost...

that the story was not about his marriage to his first wife, which was falling apart at the same time the story was written.