“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” is a six-word story, and one of the most famous examples of flash fiction. Versions of the story date back to the early 1900s, and it was being reproduced and expanded upon within a few years of its initial publication.

The story is popularly misattributed to Ernest Hemingway; this is implausible, as versions of the story first appeared in 1906, when Hemingway was 7 years old, and it was first attributed to him in 1991, 30 years after his death.