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AS THE CHICAGO, WITH DOS PASSOS ON BOARD, CUT THROUGH THE GRAY- blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1917, a Model T Ford was churning up a wake of brown dust on the bumpy dirt roads of northern Michigan. At the steering wheel Dr. Clarence Edmonds Hemingway was doing his best to dodge the wheel-busting potholes. In the backseat his wife, Grace, held their two-year-old son on her lap and competed for space with the luggage. By his side in the front seat sat his six-foot-tall, seventeen-year-old son, Ernest.

The group was on its way to Windemere, the family’s summer cottage on Walloon Lake. This year the four Hemingway daughters had taken the boat, but the two sons, mother, and father were adventurously traveling the 450 miles of rough roads using $8.32 of gas and oil and spending $11.95 for four nights of lodgings and meals. It was an arduous trip, and the car required on-the-road repairs. But for Ernest Hemingway each bumpy mile brought him closer to a boy’s paradise.

Hemingway knew that when the chores were done he would be free to dangle worms in front of pike and pickerel with a bamboo pole in clear deep waters, hunt partridge with a single-barrel twenty-gauge shotgun, swim in the lake, paddle a canoe, and lollygag in a hammock with a book. It was a Huck Finn existence complete with a straw hat.

He was leaving behind the family’s hometown of Oak Park, Illinois, a straitlaced sober Chicago suburb whose blue laws prevented anything entertaining from interfering with the Sabbath, that was so dotted with Protestant churches it was nicknamed “Saints’ Rest.” A few weeks earlier he had marked the end of a youth of churchgoing, steady meritorious schoolwork, and modest athletic success with his graduation from high school.

Ernest Miller Hemingway had been born on July 21, 1899, in a gabled Queen Anne house, one of many set back on the wide lawns that lined Oak Park’s shaded streets. His parents were an unusual couple for the staid community, as they were both professionals. His father, Clarence, was a physician, and his mother, Grace, a musician. Hemingway and his siblings came home each day from school to a house that doubled as a place of business where the father saw patients and the mother gave lessons.

The medical practice grew into a moderately prosperous affair. Using income from it and Grace’s lessons, along with an inheritance, the family built a three-story house. Large even by Oak Park standards, it was abundant with modern conveniences and designed both for family life and lavish entertainment. Its eight bedrooms held the couple, their six children, an uncle who visited frequently, and a pair of servants.

Grace ruled the homestead. Housework was done by servants and, in their absence, her physician husband. In fact, he shopped, canned vegetables and fruits, and tended the chickens and rabbits in the backyard. Beset with migraine headaches, Grace exempted herself from the duties of housewifery. She liked to remind her family that had she chosen the stage instead of Clarence, her name would be on posters outside the New York Metropolitan Opera.

The parents welcomed time apart from each other. For Clarence the outdoors provided a permissible escape from his domestic life. He shared his enthusiasm for his pastimes with Ernest. Once when his son was ten, Clarence took Ernest quail shooting. In a thicket some distance from his father Ernest found a dead quail still warm to the touch; an errant pellet from his father’s gun apparently had felled it. Ernest looked around to see if anyone could see him. Then he aimed his shotgun at the dead bird at his feet, closed his eyes, and pulled the trigger. The explosion of the twin barrels kicked Ernest back against a tree, his ears ringing and nose bleeding. He got to his feet, picked up the quail carcass, and went to find his father.

“Did you get one, Ernie?” asked his father upon spotting his son coming out of the brush.

Ernest held up the dead bird.

“It’s a cock. See his white throat? It’s a beauty,” said his father on examining it.

Ernest went to bed that night in tears, his head under the pillow. “I had lied to him,” he confessed years later. “If he would have waked up I would have told him. I think. But he was tired and sleeping heavily.”

Summers in northern Michigan also included work. This year there were a large number of house repairs to be done. “To Hemingway chores of that kind were pretty much torture,” said Bill Smith, who summered a few miles away. Smith and his two siblings were orphans who lived with an aunt in St. Louis in the winters and escaped north in the summer. Ernest and Bill enjoyed fishing together and shared a love for reading. But it was his sister Katharine who most intrigued Ernest. Slim and small breasted, Katy was not a striking beauty at first glance. Yet when she brushed back her flyaway hair, her green eyes were bewitching. But she was four years his senior, had a boyfriend, and was maddeningly condescending.

Autumn had invariably meant a return to school. The four-story Oak Park and River Forest Township High School, with a palatial front door at the top of the curved stone staircase, was the pride of the village. It succeeded so well in preparing its students that most of them met the admission standards of Yale, Amherst, or Williams and dominated the list of scholarships given by the University of Chicago to the region’s students.

Hemingway plowed his way through plane geometry and algebra, biology and zoology, ancient and American history, three years of Latin, and a heavy dose of applied and orchestral music, and he thrived in five classes of English. A cadre of talented English teachers provided topflight instruction. In his first two years they guided Hemingway through The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Twelfth Night, Pilgrim’s Progress, David Copperfield, and Silas Marner, among a wide assortment of classical texts. The emphasis in introducing the students to literature was placed on narrative.

Hemingway read Old Testament Narratives, an unusual compilation assembled for class instruction by Charles Elbert Rhodes, a Buffalo, New York, high school principal. In explaining his purpose Rhodes praised the “directness and simplicity of the Biblical style,” particularly its narrative that grew from its origins as an oral tale. “Hence, short and simple sentences dominate” with a vocabulary of “concrete words, since they produce immediate and vivid impressions.” This examination of the literary aspects of the Old Testament, familiar to him as a religious work from Sunday services at the Third Congregational Church, found a receptive audience in the teenager. “That’s how I learned to write by reading the Bible,” Hemingway told a friend a few years after leaving Oak Park High.

Later came works by Milton, Pope, Spencer, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Browning. American authors, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, were absent from class as well as in the library. Of the British writers that dominated the prescribed reading lists, Hemingway most liked Rudyard Kipling, who favored an economical style of storytelling. It was not long before he could quote Kipling passages verbatim.

Hemingway’s work spilled from the class onto the pages of the school’s magazine. He made his literary debut with a gruesome tale set in the northern woods. An Indian leaves a bear trap for his white partner, whom he believes stole his money. The man steps into the trap and is consumed by wolves. Realizing he had wrongly accused his partner, the Indian rushes back but is too late. Snagged by another bear trap, he reaches for his rifle to end his life before the wolves return to do it for him. Hemingway followed this story with one about boxing and a third one about a fugitive Indian who killed the game warden and, in turn, meets his death on railroad tracks near Wallon Lake. “The Père Marquette Limited,” he wrote, “removed all the traces.” The school newspaper the Trapeze also benefited from young Hemingway’s skill. A faculty member, recently given the responsibility for the school paper, sought to transform it from an occasionally sloppy publication to a weekly of decent quality. Looking for reporters, the teacher approached Hemingway, having heard of his writing ability from other students.

From his third-floor bedroom Hemingway pounded out contributions on a secondhand typewriter. He began first by accepting an assignment to cover club meetings and school debates before graduating to sports, mimicking the style of Ring Lardner, the famed sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune. Writing for the Trapeze made for some of Hemingway’s happiest hours of his high school years.

By the end of his senior year Hemingway was no longer the under-weight, scrawny teenager he had been when he first climbed the stone steps leading into Oak Park High. Tall and with a barrel chest, he caught the attention of girls, exuding confidence from his academic and social prowess. One girl in his class, who confessed to admiring Hemingway’s looks, classified him as “egotistical, dogmatic, and somewhat obnoxious.” However, she added, “he unquestionably had ‘personality plus.’”

On commencement day in June 1917 Hemingway was asked to deliver the class prophecy, a traditional foretelling. With the United States now at war with Germany, he predicted that one classmate would grow rich manufacturing gunpowder, another would become famous for shooting down a Zeppelin, and others would serve as soldiers and Red Cross nurses.

After graduation Hemingway wanted to join the army. The newspapers were full of stories of American boys preparing for battle. Hemingway devoured the recently published novel The Dark Forest by Hugh Walpole. The author had been turned down by the British Army because of his eyesight and instead joined the Russian Red Cross. Using his experience at the Russian front, Walpole created a poignant tale of a Red Cross volunteer who falls in love with a nurse in the course of his grisly battlefield work.

The book further convinced Hemingway that remaining behind in the United States was a mistake he would regret all of his life. But the military draft was solely calling up men over the age of twenty-one. The war might end before he reached that age. He could volunteer when he turned eighteen or even now if he gained permission of his parents. But despite the family veneration of its military history—both grandparents having fought in the Civil War—his father would hear nothing of this idea. He told his son that at age seventeen, he was too young to fight. So instead of going to war, Hemingway found himself in a car bouncing its way to northern Michigan.