Community Corner

Oak Park Couple Buys Hemingway's Boyhood Home

Kurt and Mary Jane Neumann close on historic home, with plans for restoration.

Ernest Hemingway's boyhood home will stay under local ownership.

Kurt and Mary Jane Neumann, Oak Park residents since 2006, closed on the home at 600 N. Kenilworth Ave. this week. They'll pay $525,000.

Earlier:

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“As a young man, I was influenced by Hemingway’s writing and sense of adventure. Like Hemingway, I grew up spending summers in northern Michigan and travelled extensively as a young adult,” said Kurt Neumann told the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. “I am thrilled with the idea of raising our sons in a home with such a sense of history.”

The Hemingway's moved into the home in 1906, and it's where young Hemingway is believed to have authored some of his early works. He lived there until graduating from and venturing out to work as a fledgling newspaper reporter in Kansas and later in Toronto.

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Earlier:

The property was converted to three apartments in the 1930s.

It's been owned by the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park since 2001. According to the Tribune, the EHFOP and created a $1.5 million plan in 2009 "to turn the home into a cultural center and scholarly retreat, but economic pressures pushed them to put the house back on the market."

The Neumanns plan to renovate the house back into a single-family home. According to the EHFOP, they'll make it available for tours, but only occasionally.

"We don't want anyone to feel like we're going to shutter it up or minimize the historical significance," Kurt Neumann told the Associated Press. "We appreciate curiosity in the home. We just need to balance the reality that it's going to be our family home."


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