Washington Post Features Hemingway's Birthplace

From Sunday's edition:

As a writer, I ashamedly had no clue that the Pulitzer- and Nobel Prize-winning writer was born and raised in Oak Park. Paris, Cuba and Key West, Fla.: Those are the places I had associated with Hemingway. Yet there on Oak Park Avenue stood the six-bedroom Victorian where baby Ernest was born in July 1899 in a second-floor bedroom, the second of six children of Clarence "Ed" Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hemingway, a music teacher.

The house on Oak Park Avenue was owned by Hemingway's maternal grandfather; after he died, 6-year-old Ernest and his family moved to a house a few blocks away on North Kenilworth Avenue. While the latter is closed to the public, the Oak Park Avenue residence is open for visitors interested in more than a walk-by. The wrap-around porch and round tower alone gave me a serious case of house envy. A nearby museum inside the Oak Park Arts Center offers further insight into the writer's life. Artifacts on display include a letter from the nurse who broke Hemingway's heart, thereby helping to inspire his novel "A Farewell to Arms."