ernest hemingway a biography mary dearborn

Mary V. Dearborn

Ernest hemingway: a biography, the first full biography in over fifteen years, the first written by a woman, based on new sources including materials recently released from cuba., advance notice.

“Drawn partly from new-found files and letters, Mary Dearborn has written the first biography of Ernest Hemingway from a woman’s point of view. Fascinated by her opposite, she seeks, with deep empathy, a balance between masculine/feminine qualities in a man, at times, possessed by demons. What emerges is a different Hemingway than we’ve ever encountered before.” -- Oliver Stone, director

"Dearborn (Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim) revisits one of America's most popular writers with insight and finesse, in this rich, detailed biography of Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961). Hemingway came to fame in 1920s Paris amid the fabled community of American expatriates that also included F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. His sheer creative energy glowed as he wrote his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in a little over six weeks. During the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway became a widely read, syndicated correspondent. His well­publicized African safaris and big­game hunting culminated in the celebrated short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Hemingway fired the public imagination, Dearborn shows, becoming a personification and even a caricature of virility for his generation. In 1954, he received the Nobel Prize for literature. Despite the achievements and celebrity, Hemingway led a troubled life complicated by alcohol and three failed marriages, increasingly spinning his wheels and losing his gifts. His 1961 suicide shocked the world. Dearborn speculates at length on what went wrong, attributing Hemingway's collapse to manic depression compounded by brain injuries. Her fluid narrative and careful research contribute to an impressive biography. Hemingway changed our language and the way we think, she asserts. Dearborn's account shines from beginning to end, helped by Hemingway's dramatic life and charismatic personality." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Boy, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. Dearborn gets inside Hemingway’s head where the real action is. Yes, Hemingway's appetites for drinking, fishing, hunting, bragging, and writing were enormous. And Dearborn duly documents all that hairy-chested stuff. But as this highly readable, companionable biography makes clear, Hemingway was acting out a rage that burned him up inside. It wasn't exuberance over life that him drove him on, but a desire to eat the world alive. This is a biography about a dangerous, brilliant writer." –Charles Shields, author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee and And So It Goes; Kurt Vonnegut

"Here is the literary biography for our time, a human document embracing Ernest Hemingway’s blazing genius and overwhelming despair. With clarity and compassion, Mary Dearborn has written a heartbreaking story sure to be talked about for years to come." –Marion Meade, author of Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

"Readers are in for a roller-coaster ride as they encounter the enormous complexity of the man who was Ernest Hemingway. This sensitive book is one of highs, lows, and emotional contrasts of professional successes and personal failures, his many familial generosities and vindictive publishing vendettas, and of how the love he gave freely to wives, children, and friends could turn on a dime to indifference. Mary Dearborn’s graceful and objective portrayal of an American icon will surely be the definitive one for generations to come." –Deirdre Bair, author of Al Capone

“Hemingway has been a compelling figure for biographers, in part because his outsized personality – the drinking and big-game hunting, the deep sea fishing off the Cuban coast, the fascination with bullfighting and war – combined with a rare gift for evocative prose. Now Mary V. Dearborn, a skilled biographer with access to boatloads of new material, has pushed into virgin territory, going well beyond Papa’s macho poses, digging into the cycles of mania and depression, alcoholism, and suicidality that course through his life like powerful underground streams that kept breaking to the surface. I found this an absorbing and brilliant take on Hemingway.” --Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Empire of Self: A Life of Gore Vidal

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Ernest Hemingway : a biography

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

3 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station39.cebu on September 24, 2021

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Advertisement

Supported by

A Hemingway Tell-All Bares His Tall Tales

By Elaine Showalter

• May 25, 2017
• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY A Biography By Mary V. Dearborn Illustrated. 738 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.

Ernest Hemingway began his career blessed lavishly by the gods. As a rugged young journalist, with a radiant, adoring wife, he dazzled the expatriate and artistic community of Paris in 1922 with his exuberance, gregariousness and exceptional good looks, including “the most beautiful row of teeth” the writer Max Eastman had ever seen. As Mary V. Dearborn notes in her authoritative biography, Hemingway “virtually commanded affection, admiration and attention.” His first books of character sketches and stories showed that he had literary talent as well, with an understated style stripped of euphemism, piety and cant. “In the golden city at a golden time,” Dearborn writes, “he would appear a golden young man.”

With the publication of “The Sun Also Rises” in 1926, Hemingway put a stamp on his spectacular literary career. Rapidly hailed as an important American writer, he became first a celebrity and then a legend, with his voracious pursuit of the adventurous roles and violent rituals of masculine contest. As he aged, however, that myth of heroic virility seemed increasingly untenable. He extolled male camaraderie, but was driven to betray and demolish his friends. He deserted his Paris wife, Hadley Richardson, and in three more marriages became more demanding of women’s adulation and service, more selfish and abusive. As his third wife, the writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, observed, “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” And after World War II, Hemingway’s claim to literary genius seemed suspect as well. “How can a man in his senses,” John Dos Passos wondered when “Across the River and Into the Trees” came out in 1950, leave such garbage “on the page?” The international success of “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) redeemed his literary reputation for a while, and secured the Nobel Prize. But his suicide on July 2, 1961, was so shockingly at odds with the hypermasculine persona he had cultivated and protected that it undermined critical evaluations of his aesthetic standing as well. Harold Bloom saw him the same way he saw Updike, as “a minor novelist with a major style.” His golden legend became the tragic saga of a man destroyed by his demons and hiding despair. Yet Hemingway’s outsize life and controversial achievement has continued to be a magnet to biographers, and Dearborn is the first woman to join their company. A perceptive and tough-minded biographer, who has written about other fabled icons of masculinity — Henry Miller, Norman Mailer — Dearborn has now tackled the big one. A feminist biography, then? Not exactly. Her chief asset as a female biographer, she insists, is her immunity to the hairy-chested, competitive Hemingway legend. Dearborn wants to opt out of the legend business and focus instead on “what formed this remarkably complex man and brilliant writer.”

Dearborn delved into the Hemingway family archives in Texas, and she gives rewarding attention to her subject’s relationships with his father, his five siblings and especially his mother. Grace Hemingway is often seen as domineering and emasculating; Ernest claimed to hate her for her sanctimonious condemnation of his early fiction, and blamed her for his father’s suicide. Dearborn contends, however, that she was artistically talented, creative and charismatic. It’s well-known that she dressed little Ernest in frills with a long blond bob, as the twin of his older sister, Marcelline. But she also encouraged his skill with guns; at the age of 2, she boasted, “Ernest shoots well with his gun and loads it and cocks it himself.” Guns would be part of his legend, from the Tommy gun he used to shoot sharks in Bimini to the doublebarreled shotgun with which he killed himself. The cover of Dearborn’s biography pictures him aiming the Tommy gun straight at the reader, as if to demand we read the book.

Dearborn traces Hemingway’s “persistent confusion about gender identity” to Grace’s androgynous mothering style. His hair fetish, a sexual fascination with matching short haircuts and bleached blond hair for men and women, which became a theme in the gender-bending posthumous novel “The Garden of Eden,” could be judged as a shameful secret, but also, she argues, as “openness to fluidity in gender boundaries.” Of course, that openness could be risky for a macho superhero in the 1950s. When he wanted to get his ears pierced in Africa, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh, sent a tactful note to dissuade him: “Your wearing earrings will have a deleterious effect on your reputation.” Dearborn is incisive about the ways each wife handled the difficult bargain she had made in marrying a legend.

She also stresses his genetic predisposition to manic depression and suicide: “Mental illness coursed through the Hemingway family like one of the rivers Ernest wrote about with such beautiful economy.” This dark legacy was exacerbated by his experiences in World War I, his alcoholism and the five traumatic brain injuries he suffered over his lifetime. Nevertheless, she holds Hemingway culpable for inflating his legend from the very beginning. Returning to Michigan as a wounded soldier, he played the “professional veteran” in interviews. En route to Paris with Hadley, he was “constructing myths about himself before he got off the boat.” By the 1940s, he was regularly telling “tall tales” about his war heroism, “an exaggeration or lie in nearly every sentence.” These falsities, she believes, began to infect his fiction as well. In “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940), she charges, his “concerns about authenticity” in writing, political commitment, love and experience were cheapened by the “repeated use of the word ‘truly.’ Authenticity truly loses.”

Dearborn skillfully covers an enormous range of rich material; she is an indefatigable researcher. But I’m not an indefatigable reader, and her insistence on using every minute detail slows the momentum of Hemingway’s story. Even his terrible last year of depression, drugs, hospitalization, shock treatment and memory loss is high drama. But after following his inexorable march toward suicide for hundreds of pages, I just wanted him to shoot that Chekhovian gun.

Ultimately, the scale of Hemingway’s life is so colossal and his motives so convoluted that no biographer, however gifted, can neatly sever the legend from the life, or have the last word on its meaning. This spring, two other books take up more tightly focused aspects of Hemingway’s life; in “The Ambulance Drivers,” James McGrath Morris looks closely at the difficult friendship of Hemingway and Dos Passos, and in “Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy,” Nicholas Reynolds uncovers Hemingway’s “secret adventures” in espionage between 1935 and 1961. Dearborn includes elements of both studies in her capacious volume, but she ends with another portrait of the artist as a victim of both his self-destructive urges and a genetic fate he could not prevent. His final failing, she concludes, was his inability “to tell the truth, even to himself.” Yet his life is still potent and compelling to writers and readers, and his posthumous fiction, especially “The Garden of Eden,” reveals that he was trying to tell new truths about himself. It’s time to reconsider the paradigm of his tragic decline. That’s one more Hemingway legend the next biographer could overthrow.

A review on May 28 about “Ernest Hemingway: A Biography,” by Mary V. Dearborn, misidentified the type of gun Hemingway is aiming directly into the camera in the photograph on the book’s cover. It is a Thompson submachine gun, not a pistol.

How we handle corrections

Elaine Showalter is the author, most recently, of “The Civil Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography.”

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography Hardcover – Deckle Edge, 16 May 2017

• Print length 738 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date 16 May 2017
• Dimensions 17.15 x 3.81 x 24.77 cm
• ISBN-10 030759467X
• ISBN-13 978-0307594679
• See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Alfred a Knopf Inc; 1st edition (16 May 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 738 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 030759467X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307594679
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 17.15 x 3.81 x 24.77 cm
• 8,670 in Biographies on Novelist & Playwrights
• 16,952 in Historical Biographies by Country

About the author

Mary v. dearborn.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from United Kingdom

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• UK Modern Slavery Statement
• Sustainability
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell on Amazon Business
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Sell on Amazon Launchpad
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect and build your brand
• Associates Programme
• Fulfilment by Amazon
• Seller Fulfilled Prime
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Make Money with Us
• Instalments by Barclays
• Amazon Platinum Mastercard
• Amazon Classic Mastercard
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Payment Methods Help
• Shop with Points
• Top Up Your Account
• Top Up Your Account in Store
• COVID-19 and Amazon
• Track Packages or View Orders
• Delivery Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Amazon Mobile App
• Customer Service
• Accessibility
• Conditions of Use & Sale
• Privacy Notice
• Cookies Notice
• Interest-Based Ads Notice

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

• To view this video, download Flash Player

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography Audio CD – CD, May 16 2017

• Language English
• Publisher HighBridge Audio
• Publication date May 16 2017
• Dimensions 13.21 x 14.48 cm
• ISBN-10 1665145609
• ISBN-13 978-1665145602
• See all details

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Product description

About the author.

Tanya Eby is a novelist and an audiobook narrator who has earned several AudioFile Earphones Awards and been nominated for the Audie Award. She has a BA degree in English language and literature and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HighBridge Audio; Unabridged edition (May 16 2017)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1665145609
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1665145602
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.21 x 14.48 cm

About the author

Mary v. dearborn.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from Canada

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon and Our Planet
• Investor Relations
• Press Releases
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Become an Affiliate
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Sell on Amazon Handmade
• Advertise Your Products
• Independently Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• Amazon.ca Rewards Mastercard
• Shop with Points
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Amazon Cash
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns Are Easy
• Manage your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Customer Service
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Interest-Based Ads
• Amazon.com.ca ULC | 40 King Street W 47th Floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5H 3Y2 |1-877-586-3230

StarTribune

Review: 'ernest hemingway: a biography,' by mary v. dearborn.

Mary V. Dearborn, biographer of Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, takes on another male icon in "Ernest Hemingway: A Biography."

This is the first single-volume Hemingway biography since James R. Mellow's "Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences" in 1992, and the first major Hemingway bio since Michael Reynolds completed his five-volume work in 1999. As such, it benefits from years of recent research, which Dearborn uses to compose a compelling portrait of an artist fueled and consumed by demons — manic depression and unresolved gender issues among them — whose ability to write was largely destroyed by alcoholism and traumatic brain injury.

One of this biography's achievements is to deepen our understanding of Hemingway's fraught relationship with his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway. During his lifetime, Hemingway portrayed Grace as a controlling woman who rejected his work out of Victorian prudery. Dearborn takes a fresh look at Grace, rendering her as a larger-than-life figure, an accomplished artist in her own right, of whom her daughter Sunny wrote: "When she entered a room, everyone took note of her."

Dearborn also explores Grace's long-term, apparently lesbian, relationship with the much younger Ruth Arnold. Dearborn's in-depth look at Hemingway's mother illuminates the son, showing us the origins of Ernest's strong will, charisma and voracious appetite for life.

If Dearborn's biography excels at Hemingway's origins, it's also a good look at his demise.

Dearborn narrates Hemingway's postwar artistic struggles and his physical and mental deterioration. In his last decade, Hemingway was plagued with high blood pressure and alcoholism, but Dearborn also makes the case that Hemingway incurred a traumatic brain injury in an auto accident in London during World War II, one of at least five brain traumas he received in his lifetime. She argues that the long-term effects of brain injury contributed to the manic depression, paranoia and inability to write that eventually destroyed him.

Dearborn captures Hemingway in all of his extremes, the story of a hugely flawed and endlessly compelling human being producing enduring art. She perhaps best voices the reason behind Hemingway's continued popularity toward the end of the book, when she quotes Valerie Danby-Smith, Hemingway's young muse in his final years: "When he enjoyed life, he enjoyed it to the fullest, and he had the gift of being able to impart his pleasure and enthusiasm to those around him."

John Reimringer's first novel, "Vestments," was a Publishers Weekly best book of 2010. He teaches at Normandale Community College.

• In surprise, Minnesota GOP backs Royce White to run against Klobuchar

Minnesota music legend Spider John Koerner dies at 85

• It's not funny: The disheartening state of creative and cultural nonprofits in Minnesota
• Donald Trump talks inflation, Iron Dome, Biden and bacon at Minn. GOP dinner
• Minnesota Legislature races toward deadline with bonding, rideshare bills in question
• Review: Rob Schneider shows Mystic Lake crowd there's humor outside the liberal bubble

Twin Cities native Dolores Rosedale, glamorous '50s TV model and actress, dies at 95

At Memphis BBQ contest, pitmasters sweat through the smoke to be best in pork

Cannes diary: behind the scenes of the 2024 film festival.

Sean 'Diddy' Combs abuse allegations: A timeline of key events

• In surprise, Minnesota GOP backs Royce White to run against Klobuchar 5:21pm
• Donald Trump talks inflation, Iron Dome, Biden and bacon at Minn. GOP dinner 9:47am
• Minnesota Book Awards go to Mona Susan Power, Shannon Gibney and Emma Torzs • Books
• Stretching from WW II to the present, Claire Messud's new novel is a 'masterpiece' • Books
• University of Minnesota professor wins $150,000 literary prize • Books
• Dive into Deadpool's weird comic book history • Books
• There's a lot going on in novel 'Mercury' — and all of it works • Books

© 2024 StarTribune. All rights reserved.

• Utility Menu

Duncan White

Lecturer in history & literature.

Ernest Hemingway: A Biography by Mary V. Dearborn

Publications list.

• Book Chapter (2)
• Journal Article (2)
• Newspaper Article (68)

Block Club Chicago

Your Neighborhood News Site

Ernest Hemingway’s Chicago Home, Once A ‘Grimy’ Pitstop, On Market For $2 Million

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)

Credibility:

• Original Reporting
• Sources Cited

GOLD COAST — A Chicago brownstone where an unknown Ernest Hemingway bided his time before setting off to Paris is now for sale for $2 million.

Hemingway lived on the top floor of the Chicago home at 1239 N. Dearborn St. for three months at the end of 1921. He was a young newlywed, making $52 a week writing advertisements for a dubious publication that would soon go bankrupt, according to scholars of Hemingway and Gioia Diliberto, author of a book about Hemingway’s first wife, “Paris Without End. ”

In one of his letters the nascent novelist, who grew up in suburban Oak Park, bragged to a friend he paid just $75 a month without a lease for the “pretty high grade shop,” in what was not yet the opulent stretch of Gold Coast now occupied by the city’s richest.

But his first wife Hadley Richardson found the “grimy, top-floor walk-up” to be a “cramped, shabby apartment in a poor neighborhood,” with “tiny rooms and ugly, broken-down furniture depressing, and she tried to be away from the apartment as much as possible,” Diliberto wrote in her book.

“Hemingway was not yet Hemingway. He was just another aspiring writer,” Dilliberto said. “They were on their way, but this was the initial struggle.”

The place, which Hemingway also described in his letter as an “old joint made into apartment,” is now part of a five-bedroom home across three floors , also including two street-level studios, a coach house and a two-car garage, most recently divvied up as rentals.

It’s the first time the home has been for sale in 55 years, said agent Steve Rachman of Marcus & Millichap Chicago Apartment Brokers. The listing was first reported by Dennis Rodkin of Crain’s Chicago.

The house does not bear any remnants of Hemingway’s time there, beyond a plaque later installed out front and framed magazine covers of the future American icon now covering a hallway on the bottom floor.

“People don’t seem to realize the history until they get here for the showing,” Rachman said.

While the intrepid author’s time at the Chicago home in his early 20s was only a pitstop, “the things that happened there really mattered,” said Carl Eby, an English professor and president of The Hemingway Society .

Hemingway grew up in Oak Park, where the his birthplace museum remains a tourist attraction.

In the Gold Coast home, Hemingway was likely working on a novel based on his time as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I, a precursor to what would eventually become his 1929 novel “A Farewell To Arms,” Eby said.

Inside Hemingway wrote his fiction mostly in pen or pencil, said Dr. Verna Kale, associate editor of the The Hemingway Letters Project .

During that time Hemingway was also steered away from plans to return to Italy and encouraged to move to Paris — letters of recommendation from respected Chicago literary peers already in hand — where a flourishing arts capital featured the likes of Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein and other writers of the “Lost Generation,” Eby said.

Hemingway and his wife would leave Chicago for “even more of a dump” in Paris, which did not have a bathroom or kitchen, Diliberto said.

A “sponge of a reader” who rarely threw things away, Hemingway’s cramped Gold Coast home was likely stacked with books and magazines of the Chicago literary renaissance , including works by friend and mentor Sherwood Anderson, Eby said. The time spent in Chicago profoundly shaped Hemingway’s style, which would later come to redefine American literature, Eby said.

“What he read spoke to something already part of this taste, a style sparse in its prose, with a psychological depth suggested rather than elaborated,” Eby said. “Anderson and others recognized the complexity of the average working person in a way that was not condescending. That’s something Hemingway would become very good at.”

Rachman, the listing agent, said in jest he’s now looking for a “Hemingway enthusiast with a blank check.”

“It’s the one percent of the one percent shopping in the neighborhood,” Rachman said. “It’s expensive just to get your foot in the door.”

Support Local News!

Subscribe to Block Club Chicago , an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make funds reporting from Chicago’s neighborhoods. Already subscribe?  Click here to gift a subscription , or you can support Block Club with a tax-deductible donation.

Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast:

Mack Liederman

Twitter @mack_liederman More by Mack Liederman