A MOVEABLE READ BLOG

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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