By 1956, Ernest Hemingway was in a free fall.

Once transformative and captivating, his short, simple staccato style that remade American writing decades before had gone stale. It was now emulated by numerous authors. Lost in a literary rut, he became a caricature of his super-macho characters. He dodged sniper’s bullets in France, chased wild animals in Africa and tried to outrun fame.

That summer, Hemingway found inspiration for his fiction in his adventures years earlier as a correspondent in World War II. He wrote five short stories about the war, he told his publisher, with a stipulation: “You can always publish them after I’m dead.”

Six decades later and long after his suicide in 1961, only one of those stories had been published — until Thursday. The newly published work, “A Room on the Garden Side,” is a roughly 2,100-word story told in the first person by an American writer named Robert just after Allied soldiers liberated Paris from the Nazis in August 1944.

There is little doubt that Robert is based on the author himself. The scene from the title is a garden-view room at the Ritz, the luxury hotel in Paris on the Place Vendôme that Hemingway adored and claimed to have “liberated” in the war. Soldiers in the story call Robert by the writer’s nickname, “Papa.” There are other signs, too: exclusive magnums of champagne, doting service from the hotelier and discussions about books and writers and the trappings of celebrity.