Hemingway's Northern Michigan Summers

Ernest Hemingway was three months old the first time his family brought him north to Michigan, in the fall of eighteen ninety-nine. His parents, a Chicago doctor named Clarence Hemingway and his wife Grace, had bought lakeshore lots on Walloon Lake, a few miles south of here, and in nineteen hundred they spent four hundred dollars to build a small cottage they named Windemere. Ernest returned nearly every summer of his boyhood, from nineteen hundred until nineteen twenty-one.

On these lakes and trout streams he learned to fish, hunt, swim, and above all to watch and remember. Decades later he poured those summers into some of his earliest and finest short fiction, the stories of a young character named Nick Adams. Tales like Big Two Hearted River, Indian Camp, and The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife draw directly on the woods, water, and people of this corner of Michigan.

Many were gathered after his death into a nineteen seventy-two collection called The Nick Adams Stories. In the fall and winter of nineteen nineteen and nineteen twenty, a young Hemingway lived in a rooming house in Petoskey itself, writing and giving talks. The landscape that shaped him is still all around you.