Grace Hemingway kept records of all the family’s household possessions, so the Ernest Hemingway Foundation knows everything the family owned. These records are displayed for visitors to see in the doctor’s consulting room and the family’s library.

Ernest Hemingway’s work, drawing on themes of the natural world, was inspired by the learning that took place inside his childhood home. As a physician, his father’s study was filled with medical texts and natural journals.

The period furnishings and décor in the Hemingway Birthplace were acquired or reproduced with the assistance of the Hemingway family, particularly relatives of Hemingway’s older sister Marcelline. Her recollections provided details about the rugs, wall coverings, paintings, and other features of the house.

Clarence Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, an opera performer, raised their son Ernest in a loving environment of learning, music, religion, and art. These early influences inspired much of his later work on these subjects.

Grace Hall Hemingway and her mother were both skilled painters and artists. The walls of the Hemingway Birthplace are filled with examples of their work.

Considered one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner Ernest Hemingway set down a style of prose which epitomized American modernism in its fearless depiction of the world “as it was.”

The Hemingway home was one of the first in Oak Park to have electric service, a symbol of the fading Victorian era and the dawning of the 20th century.

Ernest Hemingway’s mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was an accomplished opera singer and composer. She took music students in the home’s parlor and later from a music room of her own.

With five children and two generations of adults living together under one roof, the Hemingway Birthplace home had an atmosphere of constant activity. Evening dinners and daily prayer times were gatherings that helped connect the family to one another and form close familial bonds.

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation purchased the home in 1991, and restored it from a modernized three-flat to the Victorian showpiece it was when the Hemingways lived there.