1 hemingway's library - John F. Kennedy Library and Museum

other used the library at a very early period:
We learned to read by the "sounding out" method, and we learned quickly. Our rented house stood right
next to the public library, called Scoville Institute, and by Christmastime we were both able to read
books in the children's room of the library. When school was over, we would sit at the low tables in our
small chairs devouring the simple stories available to us until the librarian sent us home at suppertime.
Usually we took 4 books home to read at night before we went to bed.(4)
In later years the library continued to play an important role in Hemingway's life. Leicester Hemingway has given
this account of the period after the family moved to their permanent residence at the corner of Kenilworth and Iowa:
The new house was only five pleasant, elm-shaded blocks from the Scoville Institute, as the Oak Park
Public Library was called .... Visits to the library were frequent and valuable.Ernest loved adventure fiction
and, next to that, science.(5)
Late in his life, Hemingway acknowledged his debt to the Oak Park Library in a letter written on the occasion of its
anniversary in 1953. In this letter he wrote warmly of how much he owed the library and of what it had meant to
him.(6)
The Hemingway family's summer vacations at Windemere on Walloon Lake were also occasions for
reading. The family transported many books to the summer home, having received extended borrowing privileges
from the Oak Park Library. (7) This was the
beginning of Hemingway's later habit of always carrying books with him when he travelled. Madelaine writes:
"Before leaving Oak Park, we would each take on vacation some books from the Oak Park Library. And each of us
who brought books was responsible for them and took that responsibility seriously. Ernie took the most books.(8)
Marcelline also describes these vacations:
We used to get a lot of reading done in the summer. There was one summer when Ernest couldn't get
enough of Horatio Alger, and St. Nicholas used to be forwarded to us. We loved the Ralph Henry Barbour
stories in it. And I can still remember the time in 1913 when Harold Sampson was visiting Ernest and we
had started to read Dracula aloud in front of the fireplace ....
Marcelline's description of the summers Hemingway spent in a tent while the cottage was being enlarged gives some
further indication of the amount of reading he did on these vacations:
Ernest liked to read at night, just as I did, but he had to drape a mosquito netting over his cot, because his
lantern attracted the flying creatures that edged in around the tent flaps. We often used candles to augment
our kerosene lamps, but they were not allowed in the tent. (9)
Leicester's account of Hemingway's summer labors at Longfield Farm, which his father had purchased across the
lake, also helps to fill in the picture:
Ernest loved to "make hay" because it gave him a chance to develop his muscles and to compete with the
other pitchfork wielders. But the other tasks were painfully monotonous. Early in his farming career, he
was caught several times sprawled in the shade of a big tree, lost in the fiction of far places and great
adventures. "After that, all I was allowed to take to the other side were copies of Father's Journal of the
American medical Association," he recalled.(10)
Striking confirmation of the Hemingway family's literary orientation is found in a private collection of
Hemingway materials that includes twelve inscribed volumes given to
Hemingway by members of his family between his sixth and eighteenth birthdays (see Part IV, Section 5: PC,
below). Some were Christmas gifts. Lasalle Corbell Pickett's The Bugles of Gettysburg, for example, is inscribed to
"Ernest with Christmas Greetings from Grandfather and Aunt Grace and Grandmother" and is dated 1914. A. Henry
Savage Landor's An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet is inscribed to Hemingway "with love from Mother" and is dated
Christmas, 1917. Other volumes were birthday presents. Paul Selby's Stories and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln
was presented to Hemingway by his father on July 21, 1910, and Mary Mapes Dodge's Hans Brinker; or, The Silver
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