</p><p><i>This story originally appeared in the Sunday, June 27, 1999 edition of The Kansas City Star</i></p><p></p><p>"Kansas City was a strange and wonderful place," Ernest Hemingway once wrote but never published. </p><p></p><p>It was a place where "the food is good," where the people spoke "the purest American" and where, frankly, some years later he found it dull. To him, the city's memorable images included the warmth of wintertime lunch wagons, the varied inventory of downtown pawnshops, and the clouds of smoke and steam that rose from the rail yards outside the new and impressive Union Station. </p><p></p><p>Hemingway put these Kansas City observations on paper about 1932, when he was already one of the most celebrated of American writers. They are being published below for the first time, on the verge of the 100th anniversary of Hemingway's birth, July 21. </p><p></p><p>Amounting to just a few paragraphs, these fragments don't compare in scope with the unfinished Hemingway book, True at First Light, being published in July. </p><p></p><p>But they do something rarely seen in Hemingway's novels, essays and short stories: They give character and a sense of place to Kansas City, where Hemingway spent 6 1/2 months at The Kansas City Star and to which he returned from time to time. </p><p></p><p>They also provide a small but valuable piece of evidence that can help a reader solve a longstanding puzzle: Just what exactly did Hemingway mean when, in one notable short story, he compared Kansas City to Constantinople? </p><p></p><p>To be sure, the literary world at large has not been awaiting this fresh Hemingway. They will find little to chew on in these passages. But for those with an interest in how Hemingway and Kansas City go together, these nuggets, however small, will be a treat. Not too inspiring Hemingway long appreciated the writing advice and the shoe-leather experience he got cranking out police and emergency-room items at The Star in 1917-18. To a Kansas City reporter in 1940, he declared the newspaper's stylebook admonitions - "Use short sentences" and "Eliminate every superfluous word," for example - to be "the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing." </p><p></p><p>Yet of all the places associated with Hemingway, Kansas City ranked relatively low on his inspiration scale. It essentially was a layover in the 18-year-old Hemingway's exuberant journey from boyhood to the writing fame he so urgently sought. </p><p></p><p>When Kansas City appears in the short stories, novels, nonfiction books and journalism Hemingway wrote in the 40-odd years after leaving here, it's more often as a name than as a place - neither the place he saw nor the place he might have created in his imagination. Hemingway never preserved Kansas City's character in print as he did with, say, Paris or Pamplona or the woods of upper Michigan. Hemingway probably had some Kansas City stories on paper as early as 1922, but they would have met the same fate as the rest of his manuscripts in progress at the time: The valise his wife, Hadley, had packed them in was stolen in a Paris train station. </p><p></p><p>Here and there, one of Hemingway's characters admitted, without obvious derision or hometown pride, to hailing from Kansas City. For instance, despite his emasculating war wound, the journalist Jake Barnes, who is the central character of The Sun Also Rises, might have even made it kind of cool to be from Kansas City, given that novel's breezy and boozy hedonism. </p><p></p><p>But overall, Kansas City was - to borrow a phrase long associated with the importance of the unstated in Hemingway's writing - "the thing left out."