Hemingway's Apprentice Fiction: 1919-1921

IN the three years between Ernest Hemingway's triumphant return from Italy in January I9I9 and his departure for Paris in December I92I, he lived in Chicago for less than a year-a yearand-a-half if you count his intermittent residence in Oak Park; but Oak Park was never meant to count as Chicago. The better half of those years was spent in and around Petoskey and Toronto, for there he wrote the best of both his unpublished and published work, like the "Cross Roads" sketches and his Toronto Star Weekly articles. In Chicago, however, he labored at grub-street stuff for the Cooperative Commonwealth, most of it now in oblivion; and in his time off he wrote poetry, much of it in a style he later called "erectile. "1 When he remembered the fall of I9I9, he recalled shoveling gravel for the county to pay his rent in Petoskey and writing