Ernest Hemingway
Nobel laureate author Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois but until his twenty-second year his summers were spent at the family cottage on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey. An apocryphal and probably unfair quotation has him calling Oak Park a village of broad lawns and narrow minds. Whatever he felt about Oak Park, he wrote almost nothing about it.
Michigan, however, profoundly influenced Hemingway. He wrote about it often and immortalized "Up North" as a place of superior grace and exquisite beauty.
In the Federspiel Hemingway Collection the Clarke Library holds a substantial body of material by and about Ernest Hemingway. The material covers his entire life, but has an emphasis on his boyhood experiences in Michigan and the writings inspired by those experiences. Among the items held by the library is a wonderful, six page typed letter in which Hemingway attempts to persuade a wartime friend to spend the summer with him "up north." Hemingway describes the land, the fishing, and the people in glowing terms that speak to his deep love of the Michigan countryside.
Hemingway left Michigan in 1921 and never returned for more than a few days. But Michigan's imprint never left Hemingway.