The Hemingway Family and the Influenza Epidemic

By Rose Marie Burwell

Nevade “Vada” Belle Hemingway visiting with Grace Hall Hemingway in Oak Park, IL in early 1918.

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.

Leicester was practicing law in California when he was called for military duty. His wife, Vada, died of influenza on 6 November 1918. On 23 December, he wrote to Grace that he had received her letter of sympathy before he was notified that his wife had died and he did not, at first, understand the subject of which she was talking. On his return to California, he stopped to see Grace and her family in Oak Park. From his letter to her after his return home, it is clear that Leicester had noted a high level of tension in the Hemingway household, and that Grace confided to him some things about its source. In fact, he asks her if his letters to her are opened and read by her alone and invites her to bring the “little children” and come visit him for a few months, offering to pay her fare.

Grace and her youngest son, “little Leicester,” went to California for nearly six months. She enrolled him in kindergarten there and set about bringing to order Leicester’s home, which had been left exactly as it was at Vada’s death. One cannot but feel the poignancy in Grace’s accounts of her daily work: the last laundry Vada had done was lying folded on the dining room table, no cleaning had been done, and her brother had given little attention to his own living conditions.

In the milieu of Leicester’s mourning, Grace also had to cope with daily letters from her husband, Clarence, that are rife with mentions of how tired he is and how badly he needs her presence. The fatigue seems to be mingled with depression, to which he was susceptible, and with anxiety, which was nearly constant throughout his life. His emotional neediness and fatigue may also have been exacerbated by the fact that, although Oak Park had comparatively fewer cases of influenza, the infected were primarily cared for at home—by a public health recommendation—and physicians must have made many house calls. Further, a physician had to accompany every troop train originating in the Chicago area to its induction destination.

An Oak Park man died at the Great Lakes Naval Training Facility, but the regular instructions on the recognition and treatment of influenza can be seen in the Oak Leaves during the summer and fall of 1918. After Grace’s return to Oak Park, Leicester advises his sister:

“I hope your trials are not as great as they have been and that some kind of solution may gradually work out ...”

We will probably never know what the specific points of conflict were between the Hemingways at the time, but in these family papers the drama of filial devotion is framed by the influenza pandemic in these two households half a continent apart. Love in the time of influenza, indeed!

Rose Marie Burwell (1934-2020) is the author of Hemingway: The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels (Cambridge U.P., 1996).  She served on the Boards of The Hemingway Society and the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, and held Fellowships from the National Foundation for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Princeton University Library.  She was an emeritus professor at Northern Illinois University where she taught courses in the English Novel and in Modern American Fiction.

This article was published in the Hemingway Foundation Spring/Summer Dispatch 2008

The Empty Chair by Veryan Williams-Wynn

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park (EHFOP) publishes an annual literary journal through a short story contest.  This journal is designed to capture new voices engaged in the creative writing process, in fiction. First published in 2016, the series of journals titled, "Hemingway Shorts," recognizes an overall winner who will receive a cash award plus an additional ten finalists of the short story contest, giving established and emerging writers the opportunity to see their work published. Below please find the 2018 Hemingway Shorts Award Winning Short Story.

2018 Hemingway Shorts Award Winning Short Story

The Empty Chair by Veryan Williams-Wynn (Devon, United Kingdom)

Stanley’s heavy-rimmed glasses had slipped cockeyed on the damp surface of his red-veined nose, exposing his rheumy eyes, and there

they rested until the sound of Frank’s voice in the hall jolted him out of his dark musings. He hurriedly brushed a hand across his eyes,

blew his nose and replaced his glasses, but not before Frank had time to register exactly how his old friend was feeling. As Stanley

struggled to get to his feet, Frank placed a hand firmly on his shoulder and pushed him back into the armchair where his woolly-grey head

slumped back against the yellow-stained antimacassar.

“How you doing?” Frank asked, his voice overly loud with forced cheerfulness.

“Coping. I’m coping.”

“Had something to eat?”

Stanley didn’t answer. He just stared unseeing at the silent television screen. What was there to say? She’d always done the shopping,

cooking, wouldn’t let him near the kitchen she wouldn’t, not even at Christmas when the dishes were piled high after having

friends come round. No, he couldn’t cook and he didn’t feel inclined to start at this stage in his life: What was the point now that she was

gone? Anyway, he’d been to Patel’s that morning and stocked up with a supply of corned beef, tinned soups, frozen meals for one,

cornflakes, a six-pack and a bottle of the best Scotch available from the corner shop.

“Since you refuse to come over to our place, Joan said I was to make sure you were eating properly.”

“I’ve got food, I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

Frank noticed the defiant clenching of Stanley’s jaw as he spoke; his lopsided cardigan buttoned up crooked and the creased shirt.

Sheila would have as soon had those straightened out, had him looking neat and tidy. One thing about him hadn’t changed though

– he was still wearing a tie. Stan had never been seen without a tie ever, even in high summer. He was surprised though at him going

to pieces like this, but then he’d always been full of surprises. For one thing, none of his friends had thought to see him marry, such

a curmudgeonly old bachelor he’d become, when going on fifty he quite suddenly announced he was marrying Sheila from the local

pharmacy. And now Frank thought he’d never be surprised by anything Stan did ever again.

“Good, I’ll put the kettle on then, shall I?”

Frank returned from the kitchen carrying two mugs of tea, and having handed one to Stanley was about to sit down in the vacant

armchair opposite him when he thought better of it and pulled up a chair from beside the table.

“You can sit there if you want.”

“Nah. It doesn’t seem right somehow ... never sat there before, did I?

That’s her chair.”

“Was her chair.” Stanley said, his eyes welling again.

For the last twenty years, every evening year in, year out with seldom a break, Sheila had sat opposite him in that same chair. In the early

days of their marriage, she would do mending and darning; she was good at sewing. Then she took up knitting and every evening after the

dishes were done, he would watch the television to the accompaniment of her clicking needles, and it was her of course who’d crocheted

the antimacassars to protect the chair backs. Little in the ordered routine of their lives changed over the years and Stan hadn’t noticed her

restlessness, not that was, until she enrolled in a Tai-Chi class when her chair would be empty every Thursday evening. He had objected at

first as it meant having to have their evening meal early, but he soon got used to that and he couldn’t really complain since he left her alone

every Tuesday and Saturday when he went to the club for a few rounds with the boys and the occasional game of cards.

“You want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to talk about ... I’ve got to get on with it, haven’t I?”

“How about getting out – come down to the club again?”

“No,” he shouted, “how can I?”

“You’ll have to face the lads again sometime.”

Stanley looked up, his face convulsed, “I was such a damned fool, I should have known something was wrong, done something,” he

said banging his fist down on the arm of his chair.

“When did you first suspect things weren’t right?”

Stanley leaned forward resting his head in his gnarled hands.

“It was months ago, maybe a year back. I was dropping a customer off at the hospital. A regular she was – twice a week for months I’d

drive her to St. Thomas, wait in my cab listening to the radio while she had treatment, and then drive her home. It was while I was waiting

one day that I saw Sheila come out of the main entrance. It gave me quite a shock seeing her there, not that she looked sick or anything, in

fact she was quite dressed up for her. That evening I asked her if she was ill, but no – she said she’d been visiting a friend, a colleague she

worked with at the pharmacy. I believed her,even when I saw her at the hospital again some months later.”

“When did she actually tell you?”

“She didn’t. Never said a word. The first I knew of it was that night at the club,” he hissed through gritted teeth.

“Did you not talk to each other, discuss things?”

“Sometimes. I’d tell her about some of the fares I’d picked up, about the odd characters who’d get in my cab, like the geezer with a goat,

but there wasn’t much to tell really, was there?”

“And Sheila?”

“She used to natter on all the time at first – can’t say I took much notice, just the usual stuff about work. Once or twice she tried to get me to

go away on a trip, you know, one of those package holidays to some hot foreign place, but I’ve never been one for going abroad – not liking

strange food or understanding the lingo – so we never went away, except once to the Broads fishing.”

“Fishing? Sheila!”

“She didn’t fish, I did.”

“Did she mind?”

“Never said if she did,” he said, glaring at Frank over the top of his glasses.

“She wouldn’t would she, too quiet for her own good ....”

“Huh! And mine as it turned out.”

While Stanley returned his gaze to the silent action on the television, Frank took note of his friend’s knit brow and felt the barely concealed

anger seething inside him.

“You ever tell her about the horses – your visits to the betting office every weekend?”

“Don’t be daft!”

“And the poker games in the back room on Tuesday nights?”

“None of her business; anyway, it never amounted to much.”

“Bleeding hell Stan, what do you call not much?”

“That last game – well, that was different – the rest were just a few quid here and there, you know that.”

“I know, club rules, but to bet ....”

“It would never have happened if that foreign doctor from the hospital hadn’t come looking for me and come out with all that stuff about

Sheila, what was I supposed to do for god’s sake?”

“Hit him, knocked the living daylights out of him, had him thrown out, anything other than what you did.”

“It made sense at the time; he was as determined to have her as I was to keep her – deadlock.”

“You could have confronted her, but no, you had to wager her in a game of cards! How the hell could you?”

“I could tell at a glance he was no card player and I would have won, but for his bloody luck with that confounded hand.”

“Well, the blokes at the club are all drinking to you now – you’re quite the hero, ‘to Stan who lost his wife to an ace of spades!’ ”

Frank said, raising his mug and downing the remains of his tea.

THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR AND THE HEMINGWAY FAMILY

by Joan Costanza Meister (May 1, 2013)

Anson Hemingway

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.

Six weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, George Hemingway, age 19, joined the 18th Regiment, Illinois Infantry, Company I on May 28, 1861. Fourteen months later, on August 2, 1862 his brothers, Rodney, 27, and Anson, almost 18, Ernest Hemingway’s grandfather, were mustered into the 72nd Regiment, Illinois Infantry, Company D. Known as the Young Men’s Christian Association regiment, it was composed of men from Cook County.

Rodney and George were two of the five children born to Allen’s first wife, Marietta Lindsley. She died in 1842 at the birth of George. A year later Allen married Harriet and Anson was born on August 26, 1844. In Anson’s remembrances, he describes his mother as,

a brave beautiful Christian woman only 19 years old when she and father were married. He was 45 yrs. old & father of two boys . . . two girls… My mother cared for these 4 just as for her own—and the children of our 2nd group would never have known that there had been another mother if we had not been told about it.

Of the three brothers in the war only Anson returned. George died of dysentery in Cairo, IL on Oct. 17, 1862. Rodney, who was ill throughout his enlistment, was discharged in early April 1863 and died in a Memphis hospital on April 15.

Anson kept a Civil War diary from the summer of 1862 through 1863. On October 21, 1862 he sadly writes, “Father came here today. Brought the news that George was dead . . . Is going to take him home.”

Anson repeatedly wrote of illness that plagued the troops, his brother Rodney and himself:

Feb. 1, 1863, A cool day, I was camp guard. I have a toothache, Rodney was sick; Feb. 7, Rodney quite down . . .; Feb. 8: Rodney went to the hospital, He is quite sick; Feb. 20, Saw Rodney he is getting better; June 4, sent a letter home with Rodney’s death certificate.

In the Grand Army of the Republic war sketches, Anson recorded his memories:  

My first battle was the siege of Vicksburg (May 18-July 4, 1863) and engagements around there---was in several ‘close’ places but no other engagements. Was never wounded, was never a prisoner, but had a very narrow escape while recruiting our Colored Regt. in Louisiana.

Anson was commissioned as a 1st Lieutenant in Company H, U.S. Colored 70th Regiment on March 30 1864 at Natchez, MS. The accompanying photo was taken in Natchez. Although the photo is not dated, it was taken after the assassination of President Lincoln in April of 1865. The braid and tassel on the left arm of Anson’s uniform was adopted after the assassination in honor of the dead commander- in- chief. (Information from the Civil War Reenactment Society) 

In late February or early March 1866, Anson was discharged, nearly a year after the South surrendered. He returned home very changed, from the slightly-built, inexperienced seventeen-year-old to a man who commanded others in battle. He suffered the loss of two older brothers and many friends. He witnessed disease, suffering and destruction. His faith had sustained him during the war years as it would the rest of his life. On returning home, he was ready to accept the responsibility of being the oldest son of the Hemingway family, to continue his education, and to take his place in the middle-class society of Chicago and, ultimately, Oak Park, Illinois.

Note: This brief note on the military career of Anson Hemingway is taken from a longer unpublished paper by the author. A copy of which is in the Hemingway Foundation Archives.

This article was originally published in the Hemingway Foundation Summer Dispatch 2013.

Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the American Library in Paris

(edited from a ‘Detailed History’ by American Library in Paris staff)

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.

The American Library in Paris was founded in 1920 by the ALA with a core collection of those wartime books and a motto about the spirit of its creation: Atrum post bellum, ex libris lux: After the darkness of war, the light of books. The library’s charter promised to bring the best of American literature and culture, and library science, to readers in France. It soon found an imposing home at 10, rue de l’Elysée, the palatial former residence of the Papal Nuncio.

The leadership of the early Library was composed of a small group of American expatriates, notably Charles Seeger, father of the young American poet Alan Seeger ("I have a rendezvous with Death"), who died in the war, and great-uncle of folk singer Pete Seeger. Expatriate American author Edith Wharton was among the first trustees of the Library. 

Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, early patrons of the Library, contributed articles to the Library’s periodical, Ex Libris, established in 1923 and which is still published today as a newsletter. In a letter dated January 28, 1925 from Schruns, Austria, Hemingway writes to his Upper Michigan friend, Bill Smith, about a possible secretarial position with Dr. W. Dawson Johnston, Director of the American Library in Paris to help get Ex Libris and a book column Johnston wrote for the Paris Tribune out each month.  Smith did come to Paris that spring and stayed until September but never worked at the Library

Thornton Wilder and Archibald MacLeish borrowed books from the American Library. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote "John Brown’s Body" (1928) at the Library. Sylvia Beach donated books from her lending library when she closed Shakespeare & Co. in 1941.

The Library’s continuing role as a bridge between the United States and France was apparent from the beginning. The French president, Raymond Poincaré, and with French military leaders including Joffre, Foch, and Lyautey, were present when the Library was formally inaugurated. An early chairman of the board was Clara Longworth de Chambrun, member of a prominent Cincinnati family and sister of the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nicholas Longworth.

A succession of talented American librarians directed the Library through the difficult years of the Depression, when the first evening author programs drew such French literary luminaries as André Gide, André Maurois, Princess Bonaparte, and Colette for readings. Financial difficulties ultimately drove the Library to new premises on the rue de Téhéran in 1936.

With the coming of World War II, the occupation of France by the Nazi regime, and the deepening threats to French Jews, Library director Dorothy Reeder and her staff and volunteers provided heroic service by operating an underground, and potentially dangerous, book-lending service to Jewish members barred from libraries. Dorothy Reeder reminded staff and patrons that The American Library in Paris was a “war baby, born out of that vast number of books sent to the A. E. F. (American Expeditionary Force) by the American Library Association in the last war.  When hostilities ceased, it embarked on a new mission, and has served as a memorial to the American soldiers for whom it has been established.”

When Reeder was sent home for her safety, Countess de Chambrun rose to the occasion to lead the Library. In a classic Occupation paradox, the happenstance of her son’s marriage to the daughter of the Vichy prime minister, Pierre Laval, ensured the Library a friend in high places, and a near-exclusive right to keep its doors open and its collections largely uncensored throughout the war. A French diplomat later said the Library had been to occupied Paris "an open window on the free world."

The Library prospered again in the postwar era as the United States took on a new role in the world, the expatriate community in Paris experienced regeneration, and a new wave of American writers came to Paris - and to the Library. Irwin Shaw, James Jones, Mary McCarthy, Art Buchwald, Richard Wright, and Samuel Beckett were active members during a heady period of growth and expansion. During these early Cold War years, American government funds made possible the establishment of a dozen provincial branches of the American Library in Paris, even one in the Latin Quarter. The Library moved to the Champs-Elysées in 1952. It was at that address that Director Ian Forbes Fraser barred the door to a high-profile visit from Roy Cohn and David Schine,  Senator Joseph McCarthy’s notorious staff members, who were touring Europe in search of "red" books in American libraries.

The Library purchased its current premises, two blocks from the Seine and two blocks from the Eiffel Tower, in 1965 - making way on the Champs Elysées for the Publicis monument, Le Drugstore. On the rue du Général Camou, the Library helped to nurture the growth of the American College of Paris’s fledgling library. Today, as part of the American University in Paris, that library is our neighbor and tenant. The branch libraries ended their connections to the American Library in Paris in the 1990s; three survive under new local partnerships.

By the time of its 75th anniversary, in 1995, the Library’s membership had grown to 2,000. The premises were renovated in the late 1990s, and are undergoing regular updates. In 2009, the reading room was expanded and new audio-visual equipment was installed for programming. The American Library in Paris remains the largest English-language lending library on the European continent.

This article was orignally published in the Hemingway Foundation Spring 2014 Dispatch

HEMINGWAY EXPELLED FROM SCHOOL! (Well, almost)

By Craig Mindrum

In 1917, while a senior at Oak Park High School, Hemingway got into some 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).

One of the magazine co-conspirators, Ray Ohlsen, described the incident:

“We had a paper called the ‘Jazz Journal.’ There was only one copy—about five of us edited it. What we did was put in a lot of dirty jokes and attributed them to some of our teachers. It just happened that while I was practicing for the class play somebody stole the copy I had in my English book. Ernie called me up that night and wanted to know where it was. I told him I had it. He said I'd better look and check and sure enough I couldn't find it. Well, the principal Mr. McDaniel had it and we were in on the carpet.”

Threat of expulsion

The magazine raised enough concern from school authorities and from parents that there was talk of suspension or expulsion. Hemingway and the others involved were summoned to the principal’s office. The magazine was brought out as proof of indecency. There was pressure to punish the boys harshly.

Saved by the play

Hemingway was saved, however, because of an otherwise unrelated fact: He had tried out for the Senior play (“Beau Brimmel”) and got a role. (This had been a dream of his since the time he started school.)

The play was to open the week right after the boys got into trouble. Fortunately for them all, a school teacher and director of the play, Fannie Biggs, interceded for the boys and prevented them from more drastic action.

Hemingway’s buddy Ohlsen continues the story: “We would have all gotten expelled if it weren't for our English teacher Miss Biggs who we thought must have lied and told the principal that we had come to her for advice and that we had promised her we would discontinue the magazine. If it wasn't for her we would have been expelled.”

Ongoing repercussions

Hemingway narrowly avoided trouble, and the play went on as scheduled but repercussions continued in the Hemingway family. Ernest resented the lack of support shown by his parents about the incident. He had a grudge; he felt betrayed by his parents (especially his mother). To him, other boys had more support from their parents than he. For example, one of his classmates got in trouble and his father came to school standing up for him stoutly and saying the school was being too severe. Hemingway blurted out in a group, “Neither of my parents would come to school for me no matter how right I was. I just have to take it.”

Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker treats Hemingway’s high-school skirmishes as early indicators of his lifelong pattern of testing authority and experiencing family conflict over his behavior and writing.

Other biographies agree that this was not mere adolescent mischief. It was a symbolic first instance of literary boundary-testing. 

Source: Buske, Morris R. Hemingway's Education, a Re-Examination: Oak Park High School and the Legacy of Principal Hanna, 2007. Reference Book Collection. Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park Archives, Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, IL.

So I ignored him and wrote two sentences:Hemingway’s advice for lawyers and other writers in A Moveable Feast

By Brian C. Potts*

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.[1]

It won’t surprise you that Hemingway was sometimes solitary, sometimes gregarious; sometimes warm and sometimes gruff. Who isn’t?

And if you’re a writer, it won’t surprise you that Hemingway—one of the greatest writers ever—often worried about money, especially early in his career.

But would it surprise you that Hemingway—winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—faced writer’s block?

Would it surprise you that Hemingway rewrote his works over and over and over?

That Hemingway was an early bird?

Hemingway was a model of the hardworking artist not dependent on uncertain muses but on simply sitting down to write. Indeed, I have found that A Moveable Feast—Hemingway’s pseudo-memoir of his Paris years—overflows with blunt advice for lawyers, legal writers, and writers in general.

Reading Hemingway can make you a better writer and a better lawyer. In One True Sentence: Hemingway’s Advice for Lawyers in A Moveable Feast, 25 Journal of Appellate Practice and Process 391 (2025), I glean 35 nuggets of wisdom for lawyers and other writers. Here are some appetizers:

2. Flow 

The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it.[2]

When you are flowing, keep going. Maintain the flow and finish while you have momentum. If you stop, you waste time figuring out where you were and where you were going.[3]

3. Rewrite 

That fall of 1925 he was upset because I would not show him the manuscript of the first draft of The Sun Also Rises. I explained to him that it would mean nothing until I had gone over it and rewritten it and that I did not want to discuss it or show it to anyone first.[4]

When you finish the first draft and a round of editing, set your work aside and return to it refreshed. Embrace the process of rewriting, editing, and proofreading. There is no great writing. Only great rewriting.[5]

14. Plain language 

If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.[6]

Avoid long wind-ups, legalese, and ornamentation. Use plain language. Write tidysentences. Write simply. And beautifully. And sometimes passionately.

Be honest and clear.[7]

20. War stories

You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.[8]

Cherish your war stories. Some will come earlier in your career than you expect. Keep track of them. When you close a case or a deal or an estate, take the time to write a note to yourself about it. Hemingway was a consummate journaler; in fact, A Moveable Feast is rooted in his journals.  In your own journaling, ask yourself: What was the problem? Where was the drama and intrigue? How did the knot unravel?[9]

24. Walk

I would walk along the quais when I had finished work or when I was trying to think something out. It was easier to think if I was walking and doing something or seeing people doing something that they understood.[10]

Take breaks and good walks to sort through ideas and discover new ones. Many great writers swear by this.[11]

31. Stories

I told Joyce of my first meeting with him in Ezra’s studio with the girls in the long fur coats and it made him happy to hear the story.[12]

“Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can.”[13]

Tell clear and compelling stories. They make people happy. So they make people listen.[14]

---

I tell my law students to rejoice that there is no such thing as great writing; only great rewriting. So don’t worry that your first draft is garbage. Of course it is. But you will work hard and your rewriting will be gold. The sooner you start writing, the sooner you can start rewriting. Start with one true sentence. Then ignore distractions and write two more.

---

* For Maria, Mark, and Servant of God Father Patrick Ryan. My thanks to Professor Tessa L. Dysart of the University of Arizona, Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Appellate Practice and Process; to Dr. Craig Mindrum of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park; and to my Research Assistants Bar Sadeh and Mixa Hernandez.

[1] Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast 92 (Mary Hemingway, ed., 1964).

[2] Id. at 6.

[3] Brian C. Potts, One True Sentence: Hemingway’s Advice for Lawyers in A Moveable Feast, 25 J. App. Prac. and Process 391, 394 (2025).

[4] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 184.

[5] Potts, supra note 3, at 395.

[6] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 12.

[7] Potts, supra note 3, at 402.

[8] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 28.

[9] Potts, supra note 3, at 406.

[10] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 43.

[11] Potts, supra note 3, at 409.

[12] Hemingway, supra note 1, at 129.

[13] Id. at 183.

[14] Potts, supra note 3, at 415.

Considering Cather and Hemingway: An Unlikely Pairing?

By Michael Seefeldt

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.”)

“I tried to go to sleep, but the jolting made me bite my tongue, and I soon began to ache all over. When the straw settled down, I had a hard bed. Cautiously I slipped from under the buffalo hide, got up on my knees and peered over the side of the wagon. There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

Change the “peered’ to “looked” and remove the “Cautiously” (and a couple of commas) and it is vintage Hemingway. Of course those things are there and it is not, but it is very close, and some of you may have recognized Jim Burton’s wonderment in an opening scene from Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

The first quote is Hemingway writing in his fifties (A Moveable Feast), recalling his early Paris efforts. The second is Cather, in her forties, from The Song of the Lark. More:

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole.”

“If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”

“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

The first and third this time are Cather, from “On the Art of Fiction” in the periodical Borzoi in 1920, and “Four Letters: Escapism” in Commonweal, 1936. The second is a continuation of the previous from A Moveable Feast. Certainly both wrote in a simplified style, eschewing prolix verbiage.

Both also had a close feel for the land, often in reminiscent mode. They wrote rich, but non florid, descriptions of nature, often using nature to create both a spiritual atmosphere and a realistic setting for characters and events. H. R. Stoneback, standing in for Ernest, who tended to be mute on topics closest to his depths, linked the two in his essay “Pilgrimage Variations: Hemingway’s Sacred Landscapes” (R&L, 2003, Vol 35.2-3). More prone to address such things openly, Cather used earth metaphors in a similar, if broader vein: “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.”

They also shared concrete features: both were expatriates of sorts from the middle west, she to the eastern establishment, he to Europe and Cuba; but both drew heavily on a pastoral childhood there. Both started out in journalism, and had significant tenures, she as editor for McClure’s for many years, he as a foreign correspondent in Paris for a couple of salad years, but in various riffs thereafter. Both knew they had to cut themselves from journalism for the sake of their art, but both took with them pristine habits which helped significantly to form that art.

Both wrote great (WW I) war novels, A Farewell to Arms, possibly Hemingway’s most read book, and One of Ours, which won Cather the Pulitzer. Both had subordinated themselves when young before dominating, possibly lesbian literary women: Hemingway with Gertrude Stein (and Alice Toklas); Cather with Annie Fields, widow of James Fields of publisher giants Ticknor and Fields. (Her partner was Sarah Orne Jewett in possibly a “Boston marriage,” i.e., Victorian/Edwardian women living/ loving together, but not physical). And both conveyed in much of their work a languid sense of lost time, futility, even despair; while centering it all on a tested-firm moral core, whether in Antonia’s spit, Alexandra’s powerful solitude in O Pioneers!, or Henry Jordan’s universal Spanish mission. Or Santiago’s perseverance in The Old Man and the Sea, or the grandmother in “Old Mrs. Harris,” Cather’s most famous short story. The list is long and consistent and almost always includes the uncertain mix of success and fatal failure: Cantwell in Across the River, the protagonist of The Professor’s House, the Archbishop to whom death comes.

For a brief spell the fatalistic even creeps directly into their titles — Death Comes to the Archbishop, “A Natural History of the Dead,” and Death in the Afternoon all appearing in a five year window framing the start of the Great Depression (1927-32). And death, solitude, disappointment, or tragedy in love mark central themes throughout the work of both.

Of course they were different, he big and brawling and irreverent, hiding his sentiment; she proper and staid and respectful to the point of morally rejecting Oscar Wilde. He cut a dashing figure, a near Adonis in young manhood; a comely picture of her cannot be found.

Each lost painfully in early love: he with nurse Agnes in Milan; she supposedly with an athletic coed, Louise Pound, at the University of Nebraska. He totaled four wives on three continents, she was with her companion, Edith Lewis, for forty years in New York City. Her works are more quiet, and, being a generation earlier, not born in post World War I disaffection. Her plot line is more slow developing, and often cuts across time separations of a decade or more (Pioneers, Lost Lady, Antonia, Archbishop); his often take but a very few days (To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Across the River the River and Into the Trees, The Old Man and the Sea).

But in the end their deeper similarities should not escape us: each, though differently oriented, knew the darker side. “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields.” “Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” Her “There . . . nothing . . . no . . . no . . .no . . . there . . . not . . . there . . . nothing . . . not” ends in the future of the land. His blacker “Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada” does not.

But if you were to try to pick the male and female American novelists of that first half of the twentieth century, you would be hard pressed to improve on their unlikely pairing. Richard Edel, the great Henry James scholar (Hadley’s favorite novelist), was surely a bit in his cups when he said, “The time will come when she’ll be ranked above Hemingway.” But it points us to a fuller awareness of her significance.

(Willa Sibert Cather, 1873-1947; Ernest Miller Hemingway, 1899-1961)

Michael Seefeldt served on the board of the Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park from 1991-2003 in various capacities and was a Professor of Medicine at UIC College of Medicine

This article was first published in the Hemingway Foundation Dispatch Spring 2006

Teaching Hemingway and Faulkner in Unison

by Professor Walker Rutledge

Editor’s note: We received a letter upon request from Professor Walker Rutledge of Western Kentucky University, who visits the Hemingway Museum and Birthplace Home yearly with his English honors class. In the letter he explains his teaching methodology in pairing Hemingway and Faulkner. We hope to get more news from Professor Rutledge after his presentation at the International Hemingway Conference in Spain. Teaching Hemingway and Faulkner in Unison

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. Having discovered long ago that literature most fully comes to life for students when they can actually establish an identity with the author’s time, place, and culture, I wanted to build into the course two field trips—one to Hemingway’s home in Oak Park, Illinois, and one to the Faulkner sites in Oxford, Mississippi. Thanks to the University’s commitment to student engagement and to the generosity of the University Honors Program, we have been able to schedule a Hemingway Weekend and a Faulkner Weekend each year. As weathered as the expression may be, the effect of these fieldtrips upon the students can only be called “immeasurable.” The material comes to breathe in a way it never would otherwise.

As for my particular instructional approach of pairing Hemingway with Faulkner, this is a pedagogical technique that I first began using in American literature classes. With so much of the cultural and intellectual history encapsulated by duos—think Jefferson and Hamilton, or Grant and Lee—I thought that the same approach might work well with literary figures. Indeed it did! My first pairings were Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, then Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

But nowhere has this approach been more successful than with America’s two most famous Nobel Laureates—Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. By studying Faulkner, one can more fully appreciate what Hemingway is doing; by studying Hemingway, one can more fully appreciate what Faulkner is doing. The two play off each other like no one else.

Recently I have been gratified to learn that others have shown an interest in this approach. At the 12th Biennial International Hemingway Conference this summer, I have been invited to deliver a paper entitled “Hemingway and Faulkner: Using One to Teach the Other.” I shall certainly be recording my impressions at Malaga and Ronda.

Walker Rutledge, Assistant Professor

Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky

This article was originally published in Hemingway Foundations Dispatch Spring 2006

Farming in Hemingway’s Family

By Eric Kammerer

“It was a pleasant café, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a café au lait." Ernest Hemingway - A Moveable Feast

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.

Allen Hemingway (1808-1886) was Ernest Hemingway's paternal great-grandfather. He arrived in Illinois in 1854,[1] settling on 80 acres in the outlying rural community of Leyden,[2] northwest of Chicago. His farm was in what is now Chicago's Oriole Park neighborhood, part of the Norwood Park community area. He came from Terryville, Connecticut, where he served as postmaster[3] and owned a general store.[4]  

More than 70 years later, Allen's youngest son, Anson, claimed the move was motivated by his father's failing health.[5] If so, his dad chose a strenuous new lifestyle, as a combination farmer and commuting merchant, with a side gig as a Sunday school teacher.

A new railroad

The Illinois and Wisconsin Railroad was completed through Leyden in 1853. This new transportation option allowed Allen, undoubtedly after leaving a long chore list for his three sons, to travel into Chicago to operate his wholesale clock store, located on Clark Street below the offices of the fledgling Chicago Tribune.[6]  The Seth Thomas Clock Company was incorporated in 1853 near where the Hemingways had lived in Connecticut, so Allen likely had connections in the timepiece business.

Leaving a legacy

But the move may also have been prompted by a desire to leave a legacy of land. As his second wife wrote: "Mr. Hemingway is quite engaged about going out West to buy a farm for his boys. . ."[7] This dream would be dashed by the Civil War, when disease killed his two oldest sons, Union Army soldiers. Anson, Ernest Hemingway's grandfather, would go on to a long life after his Civil War service, working for the YMCA and then in real estate.

Ernest and farming

Ernest Hemingway was no stranger to farms. His parents put him to work on their forty-acre patch, which they dubbed Longmont, after a farm in their favorite Victorian novel. Longmont was across the lake from Windemere, the Hemingway’s summer home in Michigan. The family began spending summers there around 1899, the year Ernest was born. They returned nearly every summer during his childhood and teenage years, well into the 1910s.

Ernest developed an aversion to digging potatoes and picking fruit. The situation sowed seeds of adolescent rebellion, which would cause bitter conflicts with his parents.[8] Ernest shared the attitude of his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, toward farm work.  Marcelline Hemingway reported that Hall said he "hated" it.[9]

Moving between two worlds

Allen Hemingway moved daily between two eras: building a tranquil country home for his boys while riding the train downtown to work in "a rough, vulgar town that seemed to wallow in its own love of money and increasing commercialism."[10]

Chicago’s population exploded 300% between 1850 and 1860 to 112,000. The city grew due to an increasing role as a rail hub, and the Illinois and Michigan Canal opening a route to the Mississippi.[11]

Ernest Hemingway, who emerged from a proper Victorian household to post-war disillusionment, also moved between eras personally and artistically. Back in Chicago at age 20, he "wanted to be seen in exile from the banal Midwest and unencumbered by family, business, and money concerns."[12]

From farms to car washes

At the corner of Harlem Avenue and Higgins Road, the land that used to be Allen Hemingway's farm now features gasoline, car washes, and Baconators™. The convenience store in the gas station sells everyday necessities, just like Allen Hemingway's store in Connecticut.

While you're in the area, consider visiting the Norwood Park Historical Society, where exhibits show an evolution from pioneer farming settlement, to independent 19th-century railroad suburb, to city neighborhood. You can also visit Allen Hemingway's gravesite in Union Ridge Cemetery. You can get a great cup of coffee at October Cafe.

Hemingway’s birthplace home

Four short miles away, you can enter the Victorian era by touring Ernest Hemingway's birthplace home (https://www.hemingwaybirthplace.com/) in Oak Park, Illinois.

Eric Kammerer is a volunteer docent at the Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum. He is a writer from the western suburbs of Chicago.

[1] Hemingway, P. S. (1988). The Hemingways: Past & present and allied families. Gateway Press. 

[2] Conzen, Michael P. and Keating, Ann Durkin. (2005). Land Subdivision and Urbanization on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Encyclopedia of Chicago. Retrieved at http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1754.html

[3] Litchfield County Postmasters, retrieved at https://www.cga.ct.gov/hco/img/history/norton/LitchfieldPostmasters.pdf

[4] Taylor, William Harrison. (1890) Taylor’s Souvenir of the Capitol.

[5] Anson T. Hemingway, Early Settler Celebrates his Eighty-Second Birthday Anniversary -- Recalls Memories of Days That Are Gone. (1926, August 28). Oak Leaves.                  

[6] Hemingway, P.S.

[7] Nagel, James. (1996). Ernest Hemingway: The Oak Park Legacy. University of Alabama Press.

[8] Dearborn, Mary V. (2017). Ernest Hemingway: A Biography. Vintage Books.

[9] Sanford, Marcelline Sanford. (1962) At the Hemingways. University of Idaho Press.

[10] Moore, Michelle E. (2019). Chicago and the Making of American Modernism. Bloomsbury Academic

[11] Bross, W. (1876). History of Chicago: historical and commercial statistics, sketches, facts and figures, republished from the "Daily Democratic press" ; What I remember of early Chicago, a lecture, delivered in McCormick's hall, January 23, 1876 (Tribune, January 24th). Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co..

[12] Ibid.

*1861 Development Map of Norwood Park Area, courtesy of the Newberry Library

**photo credit, exhibit at the Norwood Park Historical Society

Hemingway shows his promise as a writer: Three Stories and Ten Poems

By Craig Mindrum, Ph.D.

In previous blogs, we have focused on Hemingway’s early years as a writer. In two blogs[1], we discussed in our time, a series of powerful vignettes about war and the threat of death, published in 1923. We then looked at [2] his 1924 edition of In Our Time, where the vignettes are used as interchapters between some excellent early stories.

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.

“Up in Michigan”

In Hemingway’s early story “Up in Michigan,” the quiet longing of a young woman turns abruptly into a harrowing scene of sexual violence. Liz Coates, a waitress in the small town of Hortons Bay, Michigan, develops a romantic infatuation with Jim Gilmore, a local blacksmith. One evening, after a dinner with friends and too much to drink, Jim takes Liz for a walk and then assaults her on a cold dock, ignoring her resistance. The scene is brief but brutal, rendered in Hemingway’s early minimalist style, which makes the violence feel all the more stark.

Jim puts his hand on Liz’s leg and starts to move up. “Don’t, Jim,” she says. “You mustn’t Jim, you mustn’t.” He pays no attention to her.

The boards were hard. Jim had her dress up and was trying to do something to her.  She was frightened but she wanted it. She had to have it but it frightened her.

“You mustn't do it Jim. You mustn't.”

“I got to. I'm going to. You know we got to.”

“No we haven't Jim. We ain't got to. Oh it isn't right. Oh it's so big and it hurts so. You can't. Oh Jim. Jim. Oh.”

When Three Stories and Ten Poems was first published in 1923, the story received little attention, largely because it was printed in a small edition by a Paris avant-garde press. But when Hemingway tried to reintroduce the story to American readers, publishers objected. His editor at Scribner’s, Maxwell Perkins, refused to include it in collections for years. A century later, readers approach the same scene with more clarity about consent and trauma.

What once passed as a story of “rough passion” is now unmistakably identified as rape. The unknown narrator of Hemingway’s story is silent about Liz’s suffering, which raises uncomfortable questions. The story remains powerful, but today it demands to be read not only as literature, but as a reflection of gendered violence—and the cultural blind spots that long protected it.

One can feel justified anger at how Hemingway handles the aftermath of the rape, where he undermines the trauma of the event. Liz has trouble extricating herself from under Jim, who has passed out. She wiggles free, then ends up placing her coat over him to keep him warm. She tucks the coat around him. She kisses his cheek.

“Out of Season”

“Out of Season” is an oblique and difficult story. Even here, early in his career, Hemingway  leaves much unsaid, forcing the reader to fill in the blanks. It appears to be, in the end, a story of marital discontent and malaise. Nothing goes right (one meaning of the title—recall Hamlet: (“The season is out of joint”).

The story is set in Italy and follows an American couple—referred to only as the young gentleman (sometimes just “y.g.”) and his wife—as they set out on a fishing trip on a cold day led by a local, Peduzzi, a drunken and slightly pathetic guide. The couple and Peduzzi walk through the town and out into the countryside toward the stream where they plan to fish, but the trip is disorganized and strange from the start. Peduzzi doesn’t have a fishing permit (a real source of concern for the young couple), doesn’t know where to get bait, and doesn’t have the right equipment.

The wife becomes increasingly irritated and eventually turns back, leaving the young man and Peduzzi to continue. When they finally reach the stream, they find it too high and fast to fish. The story ends with a moment of vague despair. Peduzzi wants to fish again in the morning, but the young gentleman (who has bankrolled Peduzzi’s drinking throughout the day) indicates he will not be joining them the next day. Attending to his marriage may be his motive.

The couple’s attempt at a leisure activity—fishing—may be a sign of trying to bridge the gap between them, but it fails miserably. The American couple and the Italian guide can’t communicate well, and the result is a series of small failures and embarrassments. The awkwardness of cross-cultural interaction is used to explore the couple’s own inability to communicate.

The season is wrong for fishing, the cold day mirrors the marriage, and the human connections are out of sync. Like much of Hemingway’s work, the story refuses easy resolution.

The Poems

The ten poems in Three Stories and Ten Poems range from shallow exercises to a few surprisingly mature pieces that hint at Hemingway’s emerging voice. The standout is “Champs d’Honneur” (“Fields of Honor”), a biting indictment of anonymous war that distills Hemingway’s postwar cynicism:

Soldiers never do die well;

Crosses mark the places—

Wooden crosses where they fell,

Stuck above their faces.

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—

all the world roars red and black;

Soldiers smother in a ditch,

Choking through the whole attack.

I admire the rhymes here—a kind of rhetorical order undermined by the disorder and horror described in the poem. It also includes effective alliteration and off-rhyming: “pitch and cough and twitch.”

“Riparto d’Assalto” (“Assault Unit”) includes what I would term immature and tentative use of repetition and rhyme. But it has its merits. The poem is more subdued than “Champs d’Honneur,” but just as affecting—a terse portrait of soldiers as pawns, advancing toward death with no names and no heroics, only cold inevitability.

In “Montparnasse” (a neighborhood in Paris famous for being a hub of artists, poets, and expatriates in the 1920s) Hemingway turns his attention to the bohemian world of Paris, capturing the psychological detachment of expatriates and artists who circle around death and disillusionment with a practiced cool.

These poems are not perfect, but they reveal a young writer already rejecting sentimentality and testing the emotional compression that would become his hallmark. The rest of the poems—ranging from crass (“Oklahoma”) to aimless or overwritten (“Ultimately,” “The Soul of Spain”)—serve mostly to remind us that Hemingway’s use of spare, precise language was hard-won.