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.