Every two years, members of the Hemingway Society — a group of scholars and other devotees of Ernest Hemingway’s literature and life — travel to a place of deep significance to the Nobel Laureate, who died in 1961. They’ve been to places like Venice, Italy; Lausanne, Switzerland; and Paris, France.
Now, for the first time since the inaugural conference in 1980, the society comes to Oak Park, where the great man was born and raised.
John W. Berry, the chairman of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park, which along with Dominican University in River Forest is collaborating with the society on the 17th Biennial international, said he’s anticipating at least 325 members of the society to converge on the village next week. The conference will be held between July 17 and July 22.
“We’re truly excited and honored that hosting the conference,” said Pam Lyons, the foundation’s recently installed executive director. Berry noted that the foundation landed the honor after making a bid to host the conference in Oak Park at the society’s 2014 biennial conference in Venice.
“Since we’ve opened some of the programs at the conference to the local community around Chicago, we’ll probably have many more people come than we expect,” Berry said.
According to the society’s website, conference participants will be coming to the village from 18 other countries including China, Spain, India and Iraq — most of whom, Berry said, are Hemingway scholars.
The meat of the conference features these scholars presenting academic papers they’ve authored based on analyses of Hemingway’s life and work. Participants also screen various films on Hemingway and discuss works-in-progress, in a variety of media, related to the author.
This year, documentary filmmakers Lyn Novick and Sara Botstein, both longtime members of famous filmmaker Ken Burns’ Florentine Films, will provide insights on a documentary film on Hemingway’s life that will air on PBS in 2020. The film is co-directed by Burns and Novick, with Botstein one of its producers.
“They’ll talk a bit about their process and how you approach a famous writer, but also a famously difficult personality,” said Berry. “Lynn Novick will show clips of a film they did in 1999 on Frank Lloyd Wright, another Oak Park artistic genius with a problematic personality.”
By selecting Oak Park, conference participants will revel in the place where the legacy of Hemingway, who lived a famously exotic existence around the world, is perhaps most pungent. Hemingway’s birthplace and boyhood homes are here, along with Oak Park and River Forest High School, where the writer attended.
The foundation’s Hemingway archives, which include a large collection of intimate photographs and correspondences, is housed in the special collections area at the Oak Park Public Library. The foundation, which was founded in 1983, owns/or operates the Hemingway Museum and Bookstore and his birthplace home, both on Oak Park Avenue. The privately owned Hemingway boyhood home on Kenilworth will also be open to participants.
“I think we made a very good case both in person at the Venice conference and on paper that coming to Hemingway’s hometown would be a fabulous thing to do,” Berry said, before recounting an interaction between an Oak Park resident and a Hemingway look-a-like who marched in this year’s Fourth of July parade.
“As we’re driving along Ridgeland, people on either side of the street were saying, ‘It’s Papa!’ and ‘Ernie, thanks for coming back!'”
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