Foundation sells Hemingway's suburban Chicago home

[June 14, 2012]  OAK PARK (AP) -- The suburban Chicago house where Ernest Hemingway is believed to have written some of his earliest works will be converted back into a single-family home, but fans of the novelist are welcome to visit, the new owners said.

The Ernest Hemingway Foundation put the Oak Park property on the market in February and Kurt and Mary Jane Neumann closed a $525,000 deal on the home on Tuesday.

The foundation bought the house in 2001 in hopes of turning it into a cultural center but couldn't make the finances work, according to John Berry, the group's chairman. The home has been divided into three apartments since the 1930s.

Kurt Neumann says his family plans to make their new home available to visits by scholars and other Hemingway fans.

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

Hemingway's mother, Grace, helped design the slate-blue, three-story stucco home, which they moved into in 1906. Ernest Hemingway lived there until he graduated from high school and left for a reporting job at the Kansas City Star. He is believed to have written some of his earliest works in his third-floor bedroom

[Associated Press]

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