By Patrick F. Cannon
I’ve written previously that Frank Lloyd Wright lived and worked in Oak Park, Illinois for the 20 years between 1899 and 1910. Depending on your artistic interests, a more internationally famous Oak Parker, Nobel Prize winning writer Ernest Hemingway, was born in Oak Park, but left when he was 18, rarely to return. For the record, I lived there longer than both of t hem put together.
Wright had a more physical impact – 24 of his buildings survive in Oak Park, by far the largest concentration in the world. Hemingway, of course, left behind a body of work that is widely read and studied around the world. But there are also physical reminders of him in Oak Park – the house where he was born on July 21, 1899; and the house to which the family moved when he was six. The birth home is now a museum, open to the public (hemingwaybirthplace.com).
Hemingway was born in his grandparent’s 1890 Queene Anne house, but his parents built their own in 1906. Designed by Oak Park architect Henry G. Fiddelke in a Prairie influenced style, it was specially designed to suit the needs of Hemingway’s parents. His father Ed was a physician, so the house included a separate entrance to waiting and exam rooms. Mother Grace was a singer and teacher, so Fiddelke provided a large music room, including a stage and even a balcony. The house has changed hands several times since, and those spaces have been adapted for family use. I have been in the house and seen Hemingway’s bedroom.
Both were towering figures, but their final days were quite different. Wright died full of honors, with his powers seemingly undiminished. Until his final illness, he was at his drawing board every day working on the commissions that came in on a regular basis. One oof his last great works, Manhattan’s Guggenheim Museum, was nearing completion.
Hemingway died two years later on July 2, 1961, aged 61. I was in the Army then, only recently arrived in France. I learned of his death in the Army’s newspaper, the Stars & Stripes. No cause oof death was given. He had been a hero of mine – a great writer but also a romantic figure: war hero, war correspondent, boxer, big game hunter, and bullfight aficionado. By a long way, America’s most famous writer. When I later learned he had died a suicide, I was shocked and confused.
Just as with Wright, serious biographies have been able to explain much. In Hemingway’s case, he inherited a tendency to what is now called bi-polar disorder from his father’s family. His father died a suicide, as did his sister Ursala, his brother Leicester, and his granddaughter Margaux. Since no medications were then available, like many depressives, he self-medicated with alcohol. Just before his suicide in Ketchum, Idaho, he had been treated at the Mayo Clinic with electro-shock therapy, His doctors had also noted a cognitive decline.
Having learned all this, it was easier for me to understand why he took his own life. Realizing that he could never write again – a craft he had devoted his life to perfecting – I’m sure he saw no other way out. Contrast this with Wright, who never lost his self-confidence. Had he lived to be 100, he might well have surprised us with even more startling designs.
Although Wright draws more tourists to Oak Park, Hemingway also lures his share of pilgrims. Strange, but neither the Village of Oak Park, nor any other government unit, has ever named anything after its two most famous sons. With one exception, all the local schools are named after worthies who never stepped foot in Oak Park.
Copyright 2026, Patrick F. Cannon
cannonnadedotcom 
And let’s not forget one of Oak Park’s most well-known residents and beloved writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Burroughs may not be as important a writer as Hemingway, and it’s doubtful any of his works is included as required reading in college English courses (though these days, who knows?). But I’d wager, more people have read the Tarzan stories than Papa Hemingway’s works.
Burroughs became a novelist in a very American way: He needed the money. He was making meager income selling pencil sharpeners when it dawned on him:
“….if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”
Thus a better mousetrap was invented, and a seminal character in American literary culture, the ape-man, was born.
True, Hemingway had films based on his works, but Burroughs had more, and comic books too. And to this day, more than a century later, people know who Tarzan is, and his immortal line, “Me Tarzan, you Jane!”
So if you happen to be swinging on a vine and ask a passing stranger who the protagonist was in “The Old Man and the Sea,” he’d probably tell you, “The Groton’s Fisherman?”
And, is it mere coincidence that the world’s preeminent expert in primate ethology is named Jane? I think not!
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I often drive past Burrough’s formmer home in Oak Park. Not a mansion, but near enough. If they name a school after him, the playground should certainly have a jungle gym!
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