Hemingway Celebration

I am writing to express thanks and admiration to Alfred Kazin for his perceptive article on Ernest Hemingway in your April/May issue. Hemingway’s biographer Carlos Baker said that it will be past the year 2000 before a definitive biography can be written. It seems to me that this article has moved the deadline up by a couple of years at least.

Last year some of us thought it high time that Oak Park begin an effort toward establishing a Hemingway Museum. The Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park was granted a state charter for that purpose.

Although a museum won’t be appearing soon, a celebration was held on July 21, the eighty-fifth anniversary of Hemingway’s birth, the thirtieth anniversary of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and of all things the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the landing at Duxbury, Massachusetts, of the family founder, Ralph Hemingway.

The celebration involved a dinner, films, reminiscences by people who knew him, and open house at a number of places: the high school classroom where he studied freshman English, the church he attended, the house where he was born, and the house where he grew up and wrote his first stories, as well as the library and the Historical Society.