The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park

Hemingway History: A WWI Trunk Comes Home

This trunk, which once belonged to Hemingway friend William Dodge (Bill) Horne, Jr., was generously donated to the Hemingway Museum by grandson Bill Horne. In his words:

My grandfather, William Dodge (Bill) Horne, Jr. met Hemingway while a volunteer ambulance driver for the American Red Cross during World War I. They were stationed in Schio, Italy, and drove together on the same ambulance.

After the war they lived together in Paris, and after Hemingway's failed engagement to Agnes von Kurowsky they shared an apartment in Chicago during the fall of 1920.

They stayed lifelong friends. When Hemingway married Hadley Richardson in September, 1921, my grandfather was in the wedding party. When Hemingway died in 1961, he was an honorary pallbearer. I believe when I was born on April 6, 1958 my grandparents were visiting Hemingway in Cuba.

Above, Foundation Chairman John W. Berry displays the trunk at the 2012 Hemingway Volunteer Appreciation Event on Feb. 20. Berry also read from letters between Horne and Hemingway, detailing their early friendship and Hemingway's time in Chicago after the war.

The trunk will be displayed in the Museum. Download Bill Horne's talk to his grandson's 1975 high school class about his Hemingway friendship here: 

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Hemingway Museum & Archives on Chicago Tonight

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park was featured recently on WTTW Television's Chicago Tonight program. See the video below:

Scoville Park Rededication Sunday, Nov. 7

'Peace Triumphant' restored to former glory:

The World War I monument – "Peace Trimphant" – which has gone under extensive renovation in Scoville Park will be the centerpiece of a gala Rededication and Veterans Day Celebration on Sunday, November 7, at 2 p.m. in Oak Park, Illinois. The U. S. Navy Band will entertain before and during the celebration. An official unveiling of the restored monument will highlight the event.

Oak Park citizens and friends are invited to the event which will happen 85 years after the monument was originally dedicated in November, 1925. The monument was created by local sculptor, Gilbert R. Riswold, who used his wife as the model for the female figure representing Columbia, a symbol of victory. U. S. Vice President, General Charles G. Dawes, an Evanston resident, was among the original dedication speakers.

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A reception will follow the ceremony in the Oak Park Public Library Veterans' Room. A performance by The Hemingway Readers Theatre and music by The History Singers will be offered as well as light refreshments.

The monument is composed of three larger-than-life sized figures in bronze representing the World War I forces on air, land and sea. Behind the soldier, pilot and sailor is a stone figure, representing Columbia in the act of sheathing her sword (indicating the end of war). A bronze wall plaque on the north side is engraved with the names of 56 soldiers from the Oak Park and River Forest area who lost their lives during World War I. Four plaques encircle the first tier of the pedestal base and are engraved with the 2,446 names of the enlisted men from the two communities. Ernest Hemingway is included among those names.

Hemingway and Race: A Black History Month Discussion

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park announced it will host a Black History Month conversation by its board members on “Hemingway and Race,” Friday, February 26, 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m., at the Hemingway Museum, 200 N. Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois. The panel will be moderated by board member Dr. Wendell Rayburn.

It will feature fellow board members: Virginia Cassin, Redd Griffin, John W. Berry, and Stan West, whose recent book Suburban Promised Land discusses Hemingway’s bittersweet relationship with race.

This free event will begin with refreshments.

Hemingway Foundation Featured on Comcast Community Connection

Video: Inside the Hemingway Birthplace Home

The following slideshow will give you an idea of the kind of environment in which Ernest Hemingway began his legendary life.

Hemingway On Safari

Safari Africa: a Hemingway Adventure at Brookfield Zoo, Brookfield, Illinois

November 3, 2006

By Redd F. Griffin, Past chairman and a founding director of The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park

Part I -- On the bus from the Discovery Center to Habitat Africa

Thank you for joining us on our “Safari Africa: A Hemingway Adventure.” Our route winds through worlds of reality and imagination. Our trip begins in the Des Plaines River Valley’s woods and fields. The river flows through dense forest just east of us. Author Ernest Hemingway was born in this valley in 1899. Brookfield Zoo began here in 1934. Our first destination is “Habitat Africa.” Here African animals live in settings that make visitors feel as if they were there. Hemingway’s stories do the same for their readers, conveying to them, as he would say, “how it was.” It was in this valley in the early 1900’s that young Ernest began acquiring the knowledge and skills he would one day need in Africa. Here his father prepared him to hike, camp, fish and hunt. He taught him to closely observe animals and their habitats. His mother made him aware of how life and art affect people’s feelings. Later, Hemingway would apply these lessons in writing his observations to make people feel what he felt. Ernest learned about animals around the world from books and magazines at home in Oak Park and exhibits in Chicago’s Field Museum. At two, he drew a giraffe as a diagonal line crooked at the end--getting to the essence of his subject, as he did in his later writing. A half century later, a giraffe photo appeared above his Look magazine story on his second African safari. In the early 1930’s, when Brookfield Zoo was founded, Hemingway had gone on his first African safari to hunt and to write about what he saw. The settings of his adventures included the plain which the Masai called Serengeti, meaning “wide open space;” the kopjes, which is what the Afrikaners call the low rock outcroppings rising above the Plain; and Africa’s tallest mountain, Kilimanjaro, which the Masai called “the House of God.” At the upcoming exhibit, we can learn from these creatures and their habitats, as Ernest did. In its kopje environment are superb starlings, lilac breasted rollers, red bishop weavers, dwarf mongooses and pancake tortoises. Giraffes, subjects of Hemingway’s art, tower, like Kilimanjaro, above the rest. They winter at the kopje and summer on the savannah and the waterhole to its north and east. One animal lives at the Habitat much as its relatives do in the steep rocks of Kilimanjaro. The klipspringer, a sure-footed antelope, often stands motionless, looking out for its mate for life. Its devotion suggests metaphors in Hemingway’s stories. Here creatures’ observable qualities make readers aware of more abstract spiritual truths that he considered “impalpable.” The hyrax is another animal found near Kilimanjaro. It is a minuscule relative of the elephant. People craving its fur threatened its extinction, like many of the Zoo’s vanishing species. Now please enjoy the sights, sounds, food and drink in this Hemingway Adventure—a safari to discover his Africa.

Part II -- On the bus from Habitat Africa Back to the Discovery Center Past the Theodore Roosevelt Fountain and Gardens

In young Ernest Hemingway’s days in this valley, he enjoyed fishing and hunting for sport. Decades later, he described his initiation six miles north of here in this passage from a 1935 article in Esquire magazine: “You can remember the miracle it seemed when you hit your first pheasant when he roared up from under your feet to top a sweet briar thicket and fell with his wings pounding….” One of Ernest’s boyhood heroes, Theodore Roosevelt, also began hunting as a boy. He, like Ernest, had a mini-museum of animal specimens. As adults, they both lived the “strenuous life” Theodore advocated. They pursued fish and game in the American West, Latin America and Africa. Roosevelt and his party on an African safari in 1909 killed more than a thousand animals. The animals were then displayed in museums, which was a sign that Roosevelt’s interest in animals went beyond hunting them. He became deeply concerned when he saw whole species vanishing. He described the American bison, once forming herds in Texas a mile wide, being reduced to less than a thousand in the whole United States. He saw flocks of migrating passenger pigeons that once eclipsed the sun become extinct. Roosevelt was concerned about not only losing animals, but their habitats, which people needed to learn from and enjoy. He wrote to the nation’s governors and 500 most influential men, as follows: "It seems time for the country to take account of its natural resources and to inquire how long they are likely to last." Roosevelt, as President, urged Congress establish the U. S. Forest Service in 1905 to manage the nation’s woodlands. He set aside 194 million acres of land for national parks and nature preserves. Brookfield Zoo has long shared Roosevelt’s concern to preserve animal species and the natural world they live in. In 1954, the year Hemingway returned from his second safari, the Zoo dedicated the Theodore Roosevelt Fountain and Gardens as its centerpiece. The gardens honor his appreciation of indigenous flora with one and a half acres of 23,000 perennial wildflowers. Eight hundred flowering trees and shrubs were added to four areas nearby. Animal sculptures and Roosevelt’s messages on conservation appear in the garden area. Roosevelt’s legacy can also be found in his writing about nature and its preservation. Besides numerous articles, he wrote eighteen books that included several on ranching, exploration and wildlife. A quarter of a century after Roosevelt went to Africa, Hemingway made his first of two safaris there from 1933 to 1934. His second was from 1953 to 1954. Both were led by Philip Percival, the same man who accompanied Roosevelt as one of his great white hunters in 1909. Ernest’s son, Patrick, accompanied him on the second safari, and taught wildlife management in Africa for many years. In 1999, he edited and published True at First Light, a novel based on the first safari. Patrick, a member of our Foundation’s Advisory Board, was told of our safari tonight, and signed his book for our auction. Hemingway shared Roosevelt’s concern about the loss of natural environments in this passage from the Esquire article mentioned earlier. Ernest wrote about what he found when he returned decades later to sites he prized in the Des Plaines Valley: “I came by there five years ago and…there was a hot dog place and filling station and the north prairie where we…skated on the sloughs when they froze in the winter, was all a subdivision of mean houses, and in the town…they had cut down the oak trees and built an apartment house close out against the street.” That world whose changes are increasingly familiar today is six miles north of us. How have things changed there since these transformations nearly eighty years ago? And how should those who care deal with the prospect of more changes to come? Hemingway and Roosevelt offer us hope—and guidance. Their most durable trophies from their adventures in Africa and elsewhere are not animal specimens, heads and pelts; but laws, organizations, lands set aside and published works that are still impacting generations after them. Places like Brookfield Zoo continue the tradition. At its Discovery Center, people of all ages study animals and the natural world as Hemingway and Roosevelt did. If the Center and the Zoo deepen people’s awareness of that world, can they save more of it? Now the safari continues to the Discovery Center for a brief program, dinner, dancing and auctions.

Part III. Program at the Discovery Center

Ernest Hemingway, like Theodore Roosevelt, wrote prolifically about animals and his life in the wild, and specifically in Africa. While Hemingway’s writing did not focus as much on conservation as Roosevelt’s did, he may have promoted it indirectly by moving his readers to care more about the natural world. Hemingway through his journalistic discipline and poetic sensitivity presents richer, fuller encounters with what he writes about. He describes what is happening in the world to awaken authentic feelings in his readers. This comes through two excerpts from stories published in 1936 based on Hemingway’s first safari. These passages frame Africa’s natural world from the Serengeti to Kilimanjaro. In this passage from “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” Hemingway manages to lead his readers into the mind of a wounded lion—a very different kind of safari. “The lion still stood looking majestically and coolly toward [Macomber]….he turned his heavy head and swung away toward the cover of the trees as he heard a cracking crash and felt the slam of a…solid bullet that bit his flank and ripped in sudden hot scalding nausea through his stomach. He trotted, heavy, big footed, swinging wounded full-bellied, through the trees toward the tall grass and cover…. In this second passage, the epigraph of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Hemingway goes from empathizing with the inner life of a lion to contemplating the mysteries of a mountain summit. Here he uses pure facts to evoke a poetic and spiritual vision on a safari to the boundless. “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai, ‘Ngaje Ngai,’ the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” Could such safaris of empathy and awe, lead people to care more deeply about the natural world, and work harder to conserve it? Readers of Hemingway’s writings on Africa’s natural world have been moved to follow his trail there. Among them are Allan Baldwin, president of our foundation and his wife, Jan, who have brought video clips from their safari, including their long climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro. This was a feat both Roosevelt and Hemingway could applaud as “strenuous.” Jennifer Wheeler, our former executive director, visited sites familiar to Hemingway with staffers of Chicago’s Field Museum whose African exhibits had informed and inspired the young Hemingway. Her videos to be shown this evening offer a contemplative view of things such as Hemingway often brought to nature. We hope you enjoy these visual treats along with your dinner this evening.

©2006 Redd F. Griffin, All rights reserved.

Works Recommended By Hemingway

War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Tolstoi,

Midshipman Easy, Frank Midmay and Peter Simple by Captain Marryat

Madame Bovary and L'Education Sentimentale by Flaubert

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Joyce's Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses

Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews by Fielding

Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal

The Brothers Karamazov and any two other Dostoevskis

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane

Hail and Farewell by George Moore

Yeats's Autobiographies

All the good De Maupassant

All the good Kipling

All of Turgenev

Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson

Henry James's short stories, especially Madame de Mauves, and The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, The American

(In his own words from By-Line: Ernest Hemingway)

Notable Hemingway Quotes

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life….For [the writer] does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day. -- from Hemingway's message to the Swedish Academy on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1954

I am trying to make, before I get through, a picture of the whole world-or as much of it as I have seen. Boiling it down always, rather than spreading it out thin. -- to Mrs. Paul Pfeiffer, 1933, Selected Letters

…whatever success I have had has been through writing what I know about. -- to Maxwell Perkins, 1928, Selected Letters

The hardest thing in the world to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn… -- By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

Nobody really knows or understands and nobody has ever said the secret. The secret is that it is poetry written into prose and it is the hardest of all things to do… -- from Mary Hemingway, How It Was

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of the experience of the person who reads it. -- to Bernard Berenson, 1954, Selected Letters

He wanted to write like Cezanne painted….Cezanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing…..He…wanted to write about country so it would be there like Cezanne had done it in painting. You had to do it from inside yourself. -- The Nick Adams Stories

You see I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across-not to just depict life-or criticize it-but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. -- to Dr. C. E. Hemingway, 1925, Selected Letters

Mice: How can a writer train himself?

Y.C.: Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exactly what it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you the emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it, or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped. Remember what the noises were and what was said. Find what gave you the emotion; what the action was that gave you the excitement. Then write it down making it clear so the readers will see it too and have the same feeling that you had…. -- By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

I was trying to learn to write, commencing with the simplest things… -- Death in the Afternoon

…All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. -- A Moveable Feast

It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics. -- to Maxwell Perkins, 1945, Selected Letters

…After you learn to write your whole object is to convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader. To do this you have to work over what you write. -- By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. -- Death in the Afternoon

Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark [sic] are all sharks and no better and no worse…. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know. -- to Bernard Berenson, 1952, Selected Letters

This is the prose that I have been working for all my life [The Old Man and the Sea] that should read easily and simply and seem short and yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man's spirit. It is as good prose as I can write as of now. -- to Charles Scribner, 1951, Selected Letters

…I think we should never be too pessimistic about what we know we have done well because we should have some reward and the only reward is that which is within ourselves…. Publicity, admiration, adulation, or simply being fashionable are all worthless…. -- to Bernard Berenson, 1954, Selected Letters

The above citations are from quotes of Ernest Hemingway in Ernest Hemingway On Writing Edited by Larry W. Phillips, Copyright 1984 by Larry W. Phillips and Mary Welsh Hemingway, published by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York; and in Ernest Hemingway A-Z The Essential Reference to the Life and Work, Copyright 1999 by Charles M. Oliver published by Facts on File, Inc., New York, N.Y.

Hemingway Bibliography

In the following years Hemingway published these books:

1923

Three Stories & Ten Poems

1924

in our time [sic]

1925

In Our Time

1926

Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises

1927

Men Without Women

1929

A Farewell to Arms

1932

Death in the Afternoon

1933

Winner Take Nothing

1935

Green Hills of Africa

1937

To Have and Have Not

1938

The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories

1940

For Whom the Bell Tolls

1942

Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (edited, with an introduction by Hemingway)

1950

Across the River and Into the Trees

1952

The Old Man and the Sea

In the years after Hemingway's death, these books were published from his manuscripts:

1964

A Moveable Feast

1967

By-Line: Ernest Hemingway

1970

Islands in the Stream

1985

The Dangerous Summer

1986

The Garden of Eden

1987

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway