Pulitzer Prize-winning author expresses concern over his library fines

This is one of an occasional series in “A Moveable Read” publishing correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and the Oak Park Public Library in Illinois. These letters are being published for the first time.

Scoville Institute

Pulitzer Prize-winning author expresses concern over his library fines

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.

- Craig Mindrum, Ph.D.

[Postmarked] FINCA VIGIA SAN FRANCISCO DE PAULA, CUBA [Hemingway’s residence]

June 10th 1953

Dear Mr. Wezeman:

Thank you very much for your letter. Unfortunately, I was at sea when anniversary dinner of the library occurred or I would have sent you a message telling you how much I owe to the library and how much it has meant to me all my life.

If it is not too late could you see that this letter reaches those who were present at the dinner? I would be very glad to pay for the cost of having it mimeographed and, in any event, enclose a small check.

If you find that I owe any fines or dues you can apply it against them.     

I was born 13 years after Scoville Institute [the original village library] was founded so I cannot really rate as an Old Timer. But I was frequenting the Library within three years after the founding.

If you would like to have a set of the books which Scribner’s are publishing of mine for the Library I would be very happy to write in them if they would be of any value or use to you.

With sincere best wishes,

[signed] Ernest Hemingway

Credit:

Hemingway, Ernest. Letter to Frederick Wezeman, 10 June 1953. Ernest Hemingway collection. Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, IL USA.

Dreams and Desperation: Ernest Hemingway’s Family in Pinellas County, Florida

Please note this article was first published in The Florida Genealogist, Volume XLVIII – Number 1 (161), June 2025

By Karen A. Fortin

Clarence Hemingway with daughter Carol on Sanibel Island, April 1921 (Courtesy of the Sanibel Historical Museum and Village, Inc.)

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.[1]

In April 1921, Ernest’s father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, and Ernest’s youngest sister, Carol, joined Anson, Adelaide, and Clarence’s sister Grace on Sanibel Island for a brief escape from the snow in Oak Park, Illinois.[2] Clarence, an avid fisherman and outdoorsman, must have greatly enjoyed his trip to Florida as he and his wife, Grace Hall Hemingway, began their own winter excursions beginning in 1923. However, unlike Ernest’s grandparents, his parents preferred the more populous and urbanized area of Pinellas County.[3]

For better or for worse, Clarence and Grace’s early visits coincided with the start of Florida’s brief land boom in the 1920s, when hopes of making a fortune on land speculation, particularly on the buying and selling of lots in newly created subdivisions, brought on a gold fever-like atmosphere that encouraged locals and winter visitors alike to invest their life savings in the seemingly endless possibilities promoted by a horde of agents eager to take their money.[4]

Although Clarence was a practicing family doctor, he was no stranger to real estate. Both his father, Anson, and his brother George were successful real estate agents, and his wife’s cousin, Fred E. Hall, had made money selling Florida property.[5] Clarence must have thought he would be able to follow in his family’s footsteps and make enough money to set himself and his family up for the future. From 1924 to 1927, Clarence purchased 17 subdivision lots in St. Petersburg, Clearwater, and Gulfport.[6] Clarence was able to do this by investing the entirety of his and Grace’s savings, the money he had inherited following his father’s death in 1926, and a $15,000 mortgage he took out on the family home in Oak Park.[7] In other words, he gambled everything he had or could borrow on what he thought was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Real estate advertisement in St. Petersburg Times newspaper, 4 January 1925, p. 10

[https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/314828759/]

Unfortunately for Clarence, even as he was purchasing his last Florida properties, the boom had already gone bust.[8] As with hundreds of other hopefuls, Clarence was left holding empty lots in barely developed subdivisions that no one wanted to live in, in debt, and trying to figure out how he was going to pay off the mortgage payments back home and the inevitable taxes on now nearly worthless property. His dreams of being able to retire to Pinellas County with his wife and live a comfortable life in the sunshine were dashed.

Clarence was able to sell at least one of his Florida properties in November 1926 for $1,120 to be paid to Clarence and Grace in three payments over 18 months.[9] His last trip to Pinellas County took place in the spring of 1928, when he and his wife rented rooms on 3rd Avenue NE in St. Petersburg, a short walk from the recently opened “Million Dollar Pier.”[10] A real estate advisor reassured Clarence and Grace that it was only a temporary lull, and the value of their properties would rebound soon, so the Hemingways held on to the remaining lots in the hope that this advice would prove true.[11]

Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, Ernest’s oldest sister, portrays her father’s desperation after he sank everything into his Florida dream and was then faced with the consequences of his actions. Accounts from Marcelline and others portray Clarence as a man who had long struggled with worsening mental health issues. He was known to have unpredictable and sudden mood shifts from his usual affability to anger that became increasingly frequent over time. By 1927 and 1928, Clarence became suspicious of nearly everyone and began locking his bureau drawer and his clothes closet and regularly locking himself in his office at home.[12]

In addition to his mental struggles, his physical health had also taken a turn for the worse. By 1928, Clarence had been diagnosed with both diabetes and angina pectoris. Marcelline recounts that her father’s hair had begun to turn silver in 1926, when he was only 55 years old, and he began looking thinner and more tired.[13] It seems likely that his health issues and the reality that he may not be able to continue with his medical practice for many more years, at least in part prompted Clarence’s plunge into the Florida real estate market in the hope of ensuring that he and his family would be taken care of in the future.

In Marcelline’s book, At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait, she describes a conversation between her father and her uncle, George Hemingway. As December 1928 approached and the looming date for the next round of payments on the Florida properties were imminent, Clarence sought help from his brother. Rather than help him financially as Clarence had hoped, George advised him to sell off as much of the land as he could. Clarence responded, “But I don’t see how I can sell those lots. They are for our family and our future.”[14]

Grace Hall and Clarence E. Hemingway with Ernest (left) and sister Marcelline (right), 1900 (EHFOP Archives)

The stress and financial worries took a severe toll on Clarence’s physical and mental health. After he returned from Florida to Oak Park with Grace in 1928, he refused to slow down his medical practice or follow the health guidelines he knew all too well for treating his diabetes.[15] His conversation with George appears to have been a last-ditch effort to try and alleviate some of the pressure building within him. It failed.

On the morning of December 6, 1928, Clarence woke up with pain in one of his feet. When he mentioned this to Grace at breakfast, she insisted that he visit the hospital to have it checked out. Clarence told her that he would do so and then left the house for his usual morning rounds. He returned around noon and said that he was going to rest for a while and asked Grace to let him know when lunch was ready. He proceeded upstairs to his bedroom, closed the door, picked up his father’s Civil War pistol, and shot himself.[16]

Marcelline’s recounting of her father’s last few years portrays Clarence’s growing desperation. Following his diagnosis of diabetes in 1927, Clarence stated, “But I’ve never been sick. I can’t live that way…I won’t be an invalid.”[17] Marcelline believed that her father either knew, suspected, or feared that the foot pain meant the development of gangrene. He had previously treated a patient who had lost a leg that way. The thought of possibly finding himself in a similar situation and the constant pain from his heart problems, combined with the likely inability to think clearly as his mental health deteriorated, brought about his suicide as an effort to, as Marcelline put it, “solve all his problems.”[18]

People watching Smithsonian excavation of Indian Mound at Weedon Island, ca. 1924 [Florida Memory – public domain]

Of course, Clarence’s actions only made the situation worse for the family he left behind. In addition to the mortgage payments and the taxes owed in both Illinois and Florida, Clarence’s life insurance policy was only partially paid out due to a suicide clause.[19]  Ernest stepped in to help his mother and the youngest siblings still at home and Grace began to take in boarders at the house in Oak Park.[20] Over the years, until her death in 1951, Grace made repeated trips to Pinellas County and managed to sell off all but three pieces of property.[21] It appears that she continued to struggle during this time to keep up with the recurrent taxes as shown by a public auction notice published in St. Petersburg Times on May 10, 1950, listing properties that would be put up for sale for failure to pay takes.[22] Grace H. Hemingway is listed as the owner of Lot 4, Block 10, in the Florida Riviera Plat No. 2 subdivision. This lot was purchased by the couple on June 24, 1926.[23] The amount of taxes owed was only $1.18. 

Ernest himself may have visited Pinellas County at least once as suggested in a letter dated February 20, 1929, from Ernest to his mother. He states that he, “will be down in Florida in a year or two again and like Dad the taxes will give me a good excuse to go to St. Petersburg.”[24]

Of the three lots left following Grace’s death, Lots 7 and 8 of Block 6 in the Center Section of the Shore Acres subdivision of St. Petersburg were left to Ernest. He continued to own the undeveloped lots until his own death by suicide on July 2, 1961. Ernest’s probate documents show that the lots were worth $1,800 at that time.[25] His last wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, finally sold them to a Florida builder for $8,000 on October 23, 1978.[26]

A final, disturbing note related to the Hemingway family’s connection to Pinellas County is seen in an incident that took place during Clarence’s last trip to Florida. Weedon Island is located just off the Tampa Bay side of St. Petersburg. Today this is the home of Weedon Island Preserve, a 3,190-acre natural area that includes the cultural remains of Native Americans who lived in the region for thousands of years. In March 1928, Clarence visited Weedon Island and dug in at least one Indian mound, removing the skeletal remains of two Native American individuals; a male between the ages of 25 and 40, and a female between the ages of 30 and 60.[27]

These remains were later boxed up and sent to a museum in Maine where they eventually became part of the stored collection at the Hudson Museum at the University of Maine. In 2015, the Hudson Museum reached out to the National Park Service to notify them of the remains found in their collection. An anthropologist had examined them and determined that they were of Native American origin and, therefore, fell under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. The museum documentation identified the individuals as being from the Calusa Tribe.[28] Although the Calusa Tribe disappeared from Florida in the 18th century, the National Park Service’s notice of the investigation identified the Miccosukee Tribe and the Seminole Tribe as the “present-day Indian tribes with a shared group identify to these remains.” Although documentation was not found online, it is almost certain that the remains were returned to one or both tribes following the 2015 investigation.

The most likely connection between Clarence Hemingway and Weedon Island is through the land developer for the Florida Riviera subdivision mentioned above. This developer, Eugene M. Elliott, was a colorful and well-known character during the 1920s Pinellas County land boom. He purchased Weedon Island in 1923 and began the Boulevard Bay Land Development Company, planning to subdivide the island into lots. To gain publicity to the area, Elliott lured archaeologists from the Smithsonian Institution to the Weedon Island’s Indian mounds. Although the archaeologists could tell that the artifacts they were taken to were planted, or “salted,” in one of the mounds, the stunt was ultimately successful and formal excavations began, headed by Jesse Walter Fewkes. His team reportedly removed over 400 skeletons and various artifacts from the mounds by 1924. During the ongoing excavations, Elliott would bring prospective property buyers to Weedon Island to watch the work being conducted.[29] This is undoubtedly how Clarence learned of the mounds.

In March of 1928, when Clarence decided to try his own hand at digging,[30] Elliott had already gone bankrupt following the end of the land boom and Weedon Island was vacant and in foreclosure.[31] Marcelline’s narrative of the Hemingway family states that, as a boy, Clarence “often spent his free hours after school delving into old Indian mounds along the Des Plaines River.”[32] At a time when his health was failing and he was consumed with financial worries, he may have wished to engage in an activity that reminded him of a more carefree time in his life. He, like so many others of his era, casually dismissed the Native American remains that he unearthed as little more than curiosities and “relicts.”[33]

I’d like to thank Carla Mayer of the Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum in Oak Park, Illinois, for bringing this topic to my attention and providing invaluable help in its research.

[1] John Sanford, “A Garden of Eden, or, Hemingway’s Last Lot,” North Dakota Quarterly, 66, 2 (Spring 1999): 159-163.

[2] Ernest Hemingway to Clarence Hemingway, 15 April 1921; Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters, 1917-1961, Carlos Baker, editor (New York: Scribner, 1981), 45-46.

[3] “Local and Personals,” St. Petersburg Times [Florida], 28 October 1925, page 4, column 2; imaged, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/314638373: accessed 26 January 2025).

[4] Willie Drye, For Sale—American Paradise: How Our Nation Was Sold an Impossible Dream in Florida (Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons Pres, 2016), 81.

[5] Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, At the Hemingways: A Family Portrait (Boston: Little Brown, 1962), 224; imaged, HathiTrust (https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000437559: accessed 5 March 2025).

[6] Sanford, “A Garden of Eden,” 161. (I was able to confirm 16 of these purchases in the microfilmed records held at the Pinellas County Clerk of the Circuit Court Clearwater Courthouse offices, 315 Court St., Clearwater, FL 33756; accessed 5 February 2025 and 26 February 2025.)

[7] Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, 9 December 1928; Ernest Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 479-480.

[8] Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How it Brought on the Great Depression (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020), 220.

[9] Pinellas County, Florida, Mortgage Deeds, Volume 335, page 187, Clarence E. Hemingway and Grace Hall Hemingway to Thomas H. Kingston, John S. Wells, William G. Gibson, and Evan H. Jones, 2 November 1926; microfm, Pinellas County Clerk of Circuit Court Clearwater Courthouse Office.

[10] “Dr. C. E. Hemingway Dies in Illinois,” St. Petersburg Times [Florida], 15 October 1929, page 7, column 3; imaged, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/315291183: accessed 8 February 2025).

[11] Sanford, At the Hemingways, 227.

[12] Ibid., 229.

[13] Ibid., 224.

[14] Ibid., 230.

[15] Ibid., 229.

[16] Ibid., 230-232; Mary V. Dearborn, Ernest Hemingway: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 267.

[17] Ibid., 226.

[18] Ibid., 232.

[19] Ibid., 235.

[20] Ernest Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), Footnote #2, 557.

[21] Sanford, “A Garden of Eden,” 162.

[22] Pinellas County Tax Collector notice, St. Petersburg Times [Florida], 10 May 1950, page 43, column 2; imaged, Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/image/314969111: accessed 8 February 2025).

[23] Pinellas County, Florida, Deeds, Volume 450, page 521, Boulevard and Bay Land Development Company to Clarence E. Hemingway, Married, 24 June 1926; microfilm, Pinellas County Clerk of Circuit Court Clearwater Courthouse Office.

[24] Ernest Hemingway to Grace Hall Hemingway, 20 February 1929; Ernest Hemingway, The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926-1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 534.

[25] Monroe County, Florida, Report of Appraisers, Estate of Ernest Miller Hemingway; Pinellas County (Florida) Clerk of Circuit Court, Book 4768, page 819, 27 October 1978; imaged, Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller, Pinellas County, Florida, Official Records Search (https://officialrecords.mypinellasclerk.gov/: accessed 27 January 1925).

[26] Sanford, “A Garden of Eden,” 162.

[27] “Notice of Inventory Completion: Hudson Museum, University of Maine, Orono, ME,” Federal Register, Vol. 80, No. 221, 17 November 2015, page 71840-71841 [2015-29357]; imaged, Justia (https://regulations.justia.com/regulations/fedreg/2015/11/17/2015-29357.html: 5 March 2025).

[28] Nok-Noi Ricker, “UM Museum Seeks to Return Hemingway Bones to Florida Tribes,” Bangor Daily News [Maine], 21 November 2015; accessed online through Bangor Daily News website archive, 26 January 2025, sent via email to me from Carla Mayer, volunteer, Ernest Hemingway Birthplace Museum, Oak Park, Illinois.

[29] Pinellas County Department of Environmental Management, Environmental Lands Division, “The Weedon Island Story,” Third edition, April 2005; imaged, Weedon Island Preserve website (https://www.weedonislandpreserve.org/pdf/WIBookWeb.pdf: accessed 8 February 2025), p. 25, 29. (A note sent with the remains mailed to the museum in Maine, noted in the article from the previous citation, stated that over 1,300 skeletons were removed by the Smithsonian Institution team by 1930.]

[30] Riker, “UM Museum Seeks to Return.” (The month of Clarence’s excavation on Weedon Island was on the note sent with the remains to the museum in Maine.)

[31] Pinellas County Department of Environmental Management, “The Weedon Island Story,” 30.

[32] Sanford, At the Hemingways, 21.

[33] Riker, “UM Museum Seeks to Return.” )The phrase “my relicts” was included on the note with the remains.)

“Gloomy” Oak Park: Hemingway’s 1949 letter to the Oak Park Public Library

This is one of an occasional series in “A Moveable Read” publishing correspondence between Ernest Hemingway and the Oak Park Public Library in Illinois. These letters are being published for the first time.

Robert Zuppke

“Gloomy” Oak Park: Hemingway’s 1949 letter to the Oak Park Public Library

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.

Ed L. Taylor, President of Friends of the Oak Park Public Library, had jokingly enticed Hemingway to come to Oak Park by offering him a martini (hence the reference in the letter).

Hemingway’s “kid brother” was Leicester (Les). Despite what Hemingway writes about him here, their relationship was sometimes affectionate and sometimes strained.

At the end we get a rare glimpse into Hemingway’s psyche as he talks about why he does not visit his hometown. He says it makes him gloomy and then weakly says, “I just sort of skipped it.”

-              Craig Mindrum, Ph.D.

[Postmarked]

Villa Aprile

Cortina D’Ampezzo

Italy. Feb 16 1949

Dear Mr. Taylor:

Thank you for the kind, jolly letter and the invitation. I wish I could accept it but am here until April and then have to get back to the farm outside Havana and work. Can't even think about getting up your way until get this book done. It was fine of you and the others to invite me, though, and I certainly appreciate it. Maybe I could just sneak into town sometime and have that dry martini with you and the others. Could bring some British Gordon’s up from Havana as my share.

Dick Marr who was chief of staff of the 4th Infantry Divison [sic] that I used to hang out with in Europe was an Oak Park boy (Col Richard Marr USA)  He used to walk home from high school with my sister Ura. You may have known here [sic]. She's out in Honolulu now. The other kids are all scattered. Sunny in Memphis, Marce in Detroit, Carol in Florida, my kid bro. has been all over. Is in Washington now. He came up to the 4th Inf.Div. one time when I was with them in the Bulge fight with some sort of signal corps outfit and got himself transferred to the 4th and stayed with them until it was over. He is a good kid and you would like him.

Old Zupp* came down to Cuba a couple of winters ago and we had a fine time together. I hope we can get him down again.

Between us I was always sort of gloomy about going back after was there to bury my father. It wasn't any lack of loyalty. I just sort of skipped it.

With sincere good wishes to you and to the Friends Of The Oak Park Library.

Your friend,

[signed] Ernest Hemingway

* Old Zupp is probably Bob Zuppke, a coach at Oak Park high school, though before Hemingway's time. Hemingway and Zuppke presumably maintained friendly relations over the years.

Credit:

Hemingway, Ernest. Letter to Ed V. Taylor, February 16, 1949. Ernest Hemingway collection. Oak Park Public Library Special Collections, Oak Park, IL USA.

The Hidden Sexual Taboo in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home,” Part 2

"A Moveable Read," from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, publishes a variety of analyses and points of view about Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Individual articles may not reflect the views and opinions of the Foundation.

By Christopher Morse

In the first part of this blog, [LINK] the author introduces the possibility that underage incestuousness lies below the surface of the soldier’s relationship with his younger sister. In part 2 the author explores this relationship and its implications in more detail.

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.  

Yet just how oblivious could she be? I’ll assume with you that she knows next to nothing about sex. But she is not a little tyke. Hemingway doesn’t give her age, but she’s old enough to play sports in a serious way, old enough to know about beaus and to know that she wants one. The girl must be aware, at least, that such relationships involve things like kissing and cuddling.

Even if Helen has no idea what her offer implies, the reader does. That so many reviewers protest the girl’s innocence is evidence that the incestuous, pedophilic undertones register at some level and make them uneasy. Krebs would not miss those undertones. Neither, of course, would Hemingway.

“Soldier’s Home” is crafted with the same deliberation and precision as “The Killers,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” or any of the author’s best. Every word is selected with care, and most phrases carry more than their superficial meaning. When Krebs’s mother sits down to speak with him she removes her glasses. That simple gesture is telling: she wants her son to see her clearly, but she is unwilling to see him. We are told in passing that Krebs’s father rents an office in the First National Bank building and parks his car out front. Doesn’t this suggest a status-conscious Babbitt, slyly maneuvering to be associated with the little town’s most prestigious institution? An author who takes care with such tiny details would not write a whole page of dialogue with no special purpose in mind. The exchange between Krebs and Helen represents hours of careful composition. It is inconceivable that Hemingway could have overlooked the sexual connotations. I believe he fully intended them to be there.  

During his early writing life, Hemingway penned what would have been classified as “dirty stories,” “Summer People” being a notable example. Gertrude Stein is said to have scolded the young author for writing what could not be published. But why was such material, featuring consensual sex between a man and a woman, unpublishable? It must have vexed Hemingway to labor for weeks to produce a deeply felt, elegantly crafted story, only to have it rejected on the basis of some editor’s prudery. We may imagine him taking pleasure, then, in publishing a story in which a child offers herself as a girlfriend to her adult brother. He realized that he could get away with it simply by broaching the taboo in plain sight; Helen flirts openly with Krebs at the breakfast table, their mother in the next room. The transgression is overt but filtered such that few readers circa 1925 would have allowed themselves to perceive it plainly.

Even a century later it’s hard to accept what is taking place right before us. But how else to explain this conversation? Why introduce a sister into this story at all? She is best understood as a coda to the theme of Krebs’s sexual unrest; Helen presents a possible answer to the protagonist’s main concern—which is otherwise left unresolved.

Let’s also notice how neatly she matches the specifications of the girl Krebs longs for: a friend, willing and available, uncomplicated, and requiring no courtship, no talking. It may be a plus that Helen is a tomboy, perhaps not unlike the plain girls whom Krebs dated in Germany. Pretty, popular girls, girls like Brett Ashley of The Sun Also Rises, are hard to get and grueling to maintain. They would only create more trauma for the unsteady Krebs, while plain girls and tomboys offer comfort.

How will Krebs respond to his sister’s naive prompt? He may not be fully aware of receiving it. Yet some new notion may lurk just below the surface of his mind. After the excruciating scene with his mother, Krebs elects to avoid a similar encounter with his father and retreats instead to watch Helen play baseball. Instinctively he is drawn to her as a haven from conflict, much as the girls he slept with in France and Germany provided a haven from the war. And, after all, hasn’t she indicated that coming to her game will demonstrate his love and win hers?     

It’s awful to think that he may pursue things further. Perhaps he’ll decide against it—because he just doesn’t want to, or out of concern for consequences, or for fear of harming his sister. Krebs is not malicious. But we can’t know for certain what he will do, for this young man is not operating in the ordinary world. “I’m not in God’s Kingdom,” he tells his mother. The ethical norms he once accepted without question no longer have much hold on him. Krebs went to war, got immersed in the chaos and the cruelty and the unrelenting sin of it. Sexual relations with his little sister lurk as a real possibility given the moral turmoil in which he lives.

About the Author

Christopher Morse is a freelance writer, actor, and rare book dealer, residing in the arts-oriented mountain community of Idyllwild, California. He is currently at work on a theatrical adaptation of several of Hemingway’s early short stories, tentatively entitled, Hemingway in Seven Acts.

The Hidden Sexual Taboo in Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home” Part 1

By Christopher Morse

"A Moveable Read," from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, publishes a variety of analyses and points of view about Ernest Hemingway's life and works. Individual articles may not reflect the views and opinions of the Foundation.

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.

Still, sex is prominent throughout the Hemingway canon, and little of it is conventionally “lawful”—procreative and conducted within the confines of marriage. Much of it is casual and between near-strangers. Quite a lot is outside the standards of the era. Lesbianism (called “perversion”) is central to “The Sea Change.” Pederasty is the undertone of “A Simple Inquiry.” Brother-sister incest is alluded to in “The Battler.” There is underage coupling: a girl of twelve or so is the first love of the equally young Nick Adams.

To hint at incest and underage sex combined would be risqué even for Hemingway, but my analysis suggests that he did just that in his 1925 story, “Soldier’s Home.”

In the summer of 1919 Harold Krebs reluctantly returns home from war. Because he has served several months with the occupation in Germany following the Armistice, it is now too late for a hero’s welcome. Life has moved on in his Oklahoma town. People are unreceptive when he wants to speak of his war experiences, and eventually he gives up trying.

Although it may not show, Krebs most likely suffers from shell shock—what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder. He must handle it on his own. So far, at least in his view, he is doing well. His personal therapy consists of keeping everything calm and simple. Krebs does very little in the weeks following his return: he sleeps late, reads on the front porch, strolls about the town, frequents its cool, dim pool hall.

The one issue troubling him is girls. In what may seem an overwritten passage, taking up a full quarter of the text, Krebs gazes with yearning at the young women passing along the sidewalk. He vacillates, wanting them but seeing himself no part of their world, wanting them but feeling enervated at the thought of the courting, of the complex politics, of all the talking and lies required to get them. It isn’t worth it. Krebs would like things to remain uncomplicated forever. He takes comfort in an almost mystical truth he learned in the army: “When you were really ripe for a girl you always got one. You did not have to think about it. Sooner or later it would come.”

Apart from his preoccupation with girls, Krebs feels all right: “Things were getting good again.” He appears content to remain in his detached state indefinitely.

Unfortunately, his parents do not share his equanimity. They feel dismayed over their son’s idleness and lack of ambition. The story’s climactic episode is a difficult conversation—mostly a lecture—between Krebs and his mother. This scene, contrasting the banal, workaday values with which the young man was raised against the alienated consciousness that trauma has produced in him, is one of Hemingway’s most remarkable passages, and quite rightly it receives the most critical attention.

Just prior to this scene, however, often overlooked, Krebs holds a friendly chat with his younger sister. Helen, perhaps 10 or 11 years old, dutifully brings her brother the morning paper, then sits at the breakfast table, just watching him read and eat cereal. She then invites him to come to her school that afternoon to see her play indoor baseball:

“I can pitch better than lots of the boys. I tell them all you taught me. The other girls aren't much good."

"Yeah?" said Krebs.

"I tell them all you're my beau. Aren't you my beau, Hare?"

"You bet."

"Couldn't your brother really be your beau just because he's your brother?"

"I don't know."

"Sure you know. Couldn't you be my beau, Hare, if I was old enough and if you wanted to?"

"Sure. You're my girl now."

"Am I really your girl?"

"Sure."

"Do you love me?"

"Uh, huh."

"Do you love me always?"

"Sure."

"Will you come over and watch me play indoor?"

"Maybe."

"Aw, Hare, you don't love me. If you loved me, you'd want to come over and watch me play indoor."

Prosaic on the surface, this makes for a puzzling exchange in the context of the story. Helen has little to do with the action. We can brush it off as a cute interlude, a sister so happy to have her idolized big brother home safe and letting him know in her clumsy, puppyish way how much she loves him. The problem is, Ernest Hemingway didn’t waste time on cute interludes. “Soldier’s Home” is a carefully honed work of literature—the author himself considered it his best short story—and so we must ask why he chose to give Krebs a sister and to insert her here to hold precisely this conversation. Was it simply to provide Krebs with a pal, one person in this town whom he likes and feels comfortable around? Or, perhaps, is Helen meant to represent Krebs himself, the wide-eyed innocent he was before leaving his small town for the World War? The former explanation sounds nice but seems a slender justification for the girl’s presence; the latter is both imprecise and sentimental (while Hemingway was neither). The siblings’ conversation may enhance the story, but it is not integral. Helen could be eliminated entirely with no real loss to the narrative.

But read it again. Forget for the moment that the speakers are a brother, aged about 20, and his kid sister. Helen is offering herself to Krebs as a lover. Read simply as words on a page it is hard to interpret this passage any other way. If a 17-year-old neighbor girl had dropped by to speak something like Helen’s lines, we’d have no doubt that the prophecy which army life taught Krebs had been fulfilled.  

End Part 1. In Part 2 of this blog, the author will explore more extensively the underage incestuous undertones of “A Soldier’s Home.”

About the Author

Christopher More is a freelance writer, actor, and rare book dealer, residing in the arts-oriented mountain community of Idyllwild, California. He is currently at work on a theatrical adaptation of several of Hemingway’s early short stories, tentatively entitled, Hemingway in Seven Acts.

Ernest Hemingway in Chicago

By Scott Holleran, in “Classic Chicago Magazine”

In his article, “Ernest Hemingway in Chicago,” recently publishedin “Classic Chicago Magazine,” author Scott Holleran takes the reader on a tour of places and people around the world important throughout Hemingway’s life. The first is Oak Park, IL, the village immediately to the west of Chicago, where Hemingway was born, raised, and educated. There, at the local high school, Hemingway first learned the crafts of journalism and fiction. That experience got him a job as a newspaper reporter at the Kansas City Star, where he learned the kind of spare prose that characterized his writing throughout his career.

Holleran notes several other details from Hemingway’s life, including his love of the outdoors. His father took him fishing on the Des Plaines River, just west of his home. And the family vacationed each summer at Walloon Lake, about a full day’s drive northeast of Chicago in Michigan, where Hemingway hunted and fished.

Other places and stories in Holleran’s article include Hemingway’s Finca Vigia home in Cuba. Some of Hemingway’s best and most productive years came in Cuba. There, he could also fish in the Gulf Stream on his boat, the Pilar, a 38-foot cabin cruiser. Cuba turned out to have a sad ending, however, after Hemingway lost most of what he had there following the Communist takeover.

For the article, Holleran interviewed two Hemingway scholars. One, Dr. Nancy Sindelar, is the author most recently of Hemingway’s Passions: His Women, His Writing, His Wars. Sindelar also sits on the Board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park.

The other scholar is Paul Hendrickson, author of Hemingway’s Boat. Hendrickson quotes a phrase from the writer, “I could never be lonely along the river.” Hendrickson believes that Hemingway was “lonely as a writer and a human being.” But “he could go to the river and see that moving peace of water, or, watching an old Parisian fisherman, he could never be lonely along the river.”

-              Dr. Craig Mindrum, Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park

Read Holleran’s full article at <link>.

Scott Holleran is Classic Chicago Magazine’s Short Story Editor. He lived in Chicago for 21 years and writes the non-fictional “Industrial Revolutions” column as well as short stories. Read his first book, Long Run: Short Stories Volume One, and his non-fiction, Autonomia, at scottholleran.substack.com.

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