Nighthawks is usually read as a picture of urban loneliness: four people in a lit diner at night, shut off from one another and from the dark street outside. Hopper never gave it a meaning, and the museum that owns it asks questions instead of answering.
Edward Hopper finished the painting in January 1942. He said it was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet, and that he had simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger.
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Loneliness is the usual word, but it is not the only mood in the room. In 1927, Scribner's Magazine printed a short story by Ernest Hemingway called "The Killers." Hopper wrote to the magazine in support of it, calling it "an honest piece of work." The Art Institute of Chicago says he admired the story.
It takes place in a diner. Two hired men, Max and Al, walk into Henry's Lunch-Room in Summit, Illinois, and wait for a Swedish ex-heavyweight prizefighter named Ole Andreson. They tie up two men in the kitchen. Andreson never comes.
The art historian Gail Levin linked both the setting and the suspense of Nighthawks to that story. No line from Hopper confirms the link. But it changes the window. A lit diner on a dark street can hold people who are alone, and it can also hold people who are waiting for someone to walk in.
Which Hemingway story is Nighthawks?
Possibly both. The Art Institute says Hopper admired "The Killers," and it has also been suggested that the picture owes something to a second Hemingway story, "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," printed in the same magazine in 1933. The two pull the picture in opposite directions.
In the second story, a deaf old man sits drinking brandy in a cafe late at night. A young waiter wants to go home. The older waiter, who understands why the old man stays, talks about people who need "a clean, well-lighted place" to spend the night. Nobody in it is a threat. The old man is simply alone, and the light is what he has.
Read against "The Killers," the diner's silence turns into a held breath. Read against the cafe story, the same silence is shelter. I think Hopper let the room carry both, and his wife's notes on the picture point somewhere else, to the man behind the counter.
What You'll Discover
Whose face the counterman wears.
Who moved into the diner later.
What the museum asks instead.