The First World War produced profound political, economic, and social transformations that fostered a period of social liberalism in the Western world. In the United States, the 1920s were marked by economic growth, new forms of leisure, and a belief in progress alongside social struggles. Within this context, the “flapper”—not just a dancer but a broader concept describing the post-war New Woman—emerged as a figure who challenged Victorian norms by embracing sexual freedom, public life, and new social behaviors. The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 reinforced a generational divide, granting women greater independence, although they remained subordinate in many areas such as politics and the workplace. This new female identity provoked anxiety and hostility, because it was perceived as a threat to traditional gender roles and moral values.

It’s 1953. Hemingway has won a Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea, and is a year from winning the Nobel Prize. He is writing energetically and with renewed authority. He is also preparing for an African safari late in the year.

In a surprisingly endearing letter written from his Cuba home, Hemingway marks the anniversary of the Oak Park Public Library in Illinois and sends money to cover document copying (for sharing his letter) and, amusingly, for any library fines he may have accrued over the years. He also humbly asks if the Library might be interested in a complete autographed collection of his novels.

When we think of the words Hemingway and Florida, we automatically picture the iconic estate of Ernest Hemingway in Key West. However, Ernest was not the first member of the Hemingway family to regularly visit the state. From at least 1909, his paternal grandparents, Anson and Adelaide (Edmonds) Hemingway, began winter visits to picturesque Sanibel Island, just off the coast from Fort Myers in Lee County.

In what becomes a recurring theme in Hemingway’s letters to the Oak Park Public Library, he is frequently invited to visit Oak Park (IL) for a recognition celebration. Each year he turns them down in a friendly way for various reasons. In this case he is working hard on what became Across the River and into the Trees (1950). After publishing For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway had gone through a dry spell in the 1940s in terms of a major novel. (His short story writing was still substantial.) So he was particularly driven to work on this book.

In “Soldier’s Home,” the incestuous implications of what is said by the protagonist’s younger sister (Helen) are far from subtle, and they arouse discomfort if read too closely. Most reviewers have chosen to ignore those implications; they remark on Helen’s “sweetness,” her “innocence” and even “purity.” However, there is nothing innocent in what she is actually saying, only in her presumed obliviousness as she says it.  

Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction brims with both violence and sex. Due to the restrictions of his time, the sex is rarely graphic. Sexual matters are broached via hints, euphemisms, and half-finished sentences. In the story discussed in this essay, for example, we are told repeatedly that the main character “wants a girl”; we have to infer what he wants one for.

In his article, “Ernest Hemingway in Chicago,” recently published in “Classic Chicago Magazine,” author Scott Holleran takes the reader on a tour of places and people around the world important throughout Hemingway’s life.

Grace Hall Hemingway was very close to her only sibling, Leicester Hall, and gave her last son her brother’s name—as she had given her first son his maternal grandfather’s name. Their correspondence (in the Hemingway family papers at the University of Texas) documents the mutual sensitivity and concern of Grace and her brother during and after the Spanish influenza period. This article is republished from the Hemingway Foundation Spring/Summer Dispatch 2008

We look back at the 2018 Hemingway Shorts award winning piece by Veryan Williams-Wynn of Devon, United Kingdom, for her stunning story “The Empty Chair,” a piece that deftly explores what we say and don’t say inside a long marriage.

On January 1, 1863 the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. By that date Allen and Harriet Louisa Tyler Hemingway, recent transplants from Connecticut to Illinois, had already buried one son and had two other sons serving in the Union Army.

In the closing years of World War I, 1917-1918, hundreds of American libraries, under an initiative of the American Library Association (ALA), launched the Library War Service, a project to send books to the doughboys fighting in the trenches. By the Armistice, nearly a million and a half books had been shipped to Europe.

In 1917, while a senior at Oak Park High School, Hemingway got into a bit of trouble. He and some buddies got together and published an underground magazine called “Jazz Journal.” In the 1910s, “jazz” was by itself a suggestive word, carrying modern, even scandalous connotations (nightlife, sexual looseness).

He was sitting at the next table, a tall fat young man with spectacles. He had ordered a beer. I thought I would ignore him and see if I could write. So I ignored him and wrote two sentences.

Speaking of Willa Cather, can anyone of our readers place this Hemingway quote? (Noting his bumping iambs, his simple declarative clauses, his monosyllabic repetitions, and the Bachian musicality in “made me bite my tongue,” “When the straw settled down,” or “from under the buffalo hide.”)

As the Director of the English Honors Program here at Western Kentucky University, I developed a course entitled “Honors Hemingway and Faulkner,” and I have taught this class each fall for over a decade.

It was a pleasant Wendy's. I ordered a cup of coffee and took it out front to a cement table, just feet from gridlocked Harlem Avenue. Next door, cars rolled in and out of a Shell station at the corner of Higgins Road in northeast Illinois. To the West, stacks of empty balconies fronted a series of tall, brick apartment buildings. Thunderous Kennedy expressway traffic roared past in a gulch 200 feet to the north. I had arrived at the farm of Ernest Hemingway’s great-grandfather.

To wrap up our discussion of his earliest writing, I’m going to take a look at Three Stories and Ten Poems, his official first book (1923). I’ll focus on two of the three stories in the book, then discuss some of his poems.

Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time in 1925, a year when people still were reeling from the impact of World War I. Hemingway and others had believed World War I was going to be the war to end all wars but quickly learned it was a futile blood bath. There were no heroes—just passive victims hit by shells in trenches, poisoned with gas, or scorched by flame-throwers.

In my first blog on Hemingway’s early book, in our time (1924) I wrote that the short vignettes within the book show how Hemingway’s distinctive voice was forming.

Where did that style come from? One profound influence was his work as a reporter for the Kansas City Star when he was 18. Though he only stayed seven months, the paper’s style guide—favoring short sentences, active verbs, and ruthless clarity—became the foundation of his literary voice. He later said it was “the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing.”