Ernest Hemingway

Residence 1

📍339 N Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, IL 60302, USA

“I was born in the upstairs bedroom at my grandparents' house on North Oak Park Avenue on the twenty-first of July 1899. My family moved soon after to 600 Kenilworth Avenue two blocks away, where I grew up: a comfortable Victorian house in a suburb of Chicago that called itself a town and prided itself on its churches and its propriety. My father Clarence was a doctor who took me hunting and fishing in the Michigan woods every summer from the time I could hold a rod, which was the real education. Oak Park's schools taught me grammar and not much else I have since used. I was a reporter for the Kansas City Star at eighteen; the style guide — short sentences, strong verbs, nothing ornamental — became the template for everything I later wrote. I volunteered for the Red Cross ambulance service in Italy at nineteen and was nearly killed. When I came back I was not the same person who had left, and Oak Park was not the place for the person I had become.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Ernest Hemingway Birthplace

Residence 2

📍74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, 75005 Paris, France

“Hadley and I arrived in Paris in December 1921 with a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson and almost nothing else. We rented on the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine, on the Left Bank, fifth floor, no running water and a hole-in-the-floor toilet on the landing. I wrote in the mornings at the Closerie des Lilas or in the cold flat, and the afternoons I spent at Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company on the Rue de l'Odéon, where Gertrude Stein held court and Ezra Pound crossed out half of everything I wrote and was usually right. I was learning two things at once: how to write short and true, and what it meant to be homesick for a country you had not yet made your own. The Sun Also Rises came from these years — from the bulls at Pamplona, the café arguments at the Dôme, the poverty that felt like freedom because we were twenty-two and everything was still possible and nothing had gone wrong yet.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Ernest Hemingway

Residence 3

📍907 Whitehead Street, Key West, FL 33040, USA

“Key West was the end of the American road, which suited me. After Paris, after Spain, after the wound from the mortar fragment that still troubled my knee, I needed somewhere the mainland couldn't easily reach. Pauline and I bought the house on Whitehead Street in 1931 — the first I'd ever owned. I wrote A Farewell to Arms here, and Death in the Afternoon, and short stories that defined what American fiction could be. Mornings I worked. Afternoons I fished.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Ernest Hemingway

Residence 4

📍Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, La Habana 11400, Cuba

“I bought Finca Vigía — Lookout Farm — in 1940 for eighteen thousand dollars, after living in Cuba on and off for years because the fishing off Havana was the finest in the world and nobody bothered you. The house stood on a hill ten miles east of the city with a view of the sea, and I had my cats, my dogs, my fishing boat Pilar moored at Cojímar. The Old Man and the Sea was written here, and For Whom the Bell Tolls in the Ambos Mundos hotel before I owned this place. I won the Nobel Prize in 1954 and was too ill to attend the ceremony, which was true but also convenient. Castro's revolution came in 1959 and I stayed as long as I could before American politics made staying impossible. I left in 1960 and never came back. I shot myself in Idaho the following summer. Finca Vigía was the last place I was entirely happy.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Finca Vigía