Inspired.

Michigan supplied Hemingway with the setting and characters for his formative writing. As he struggled to find his style and themes in the 1920s, he focused on what he knew well — the people and places of his summers. Sitting in cafes in Paris, he sifted through his memories and carefully selected actual people and places for inspiration. It is tempting to look at his final product and to think that Hemingway wrote things just as they happened, but he tells us this is not true and we should believe him. He pulled the essence from Michigan and created something all new. During the 1920s and 1930s he wrote and published stories featuring Nick Adams, a young man who just happens to spend summers in northern Michigan with his doctor father and artistic mother. Nick also just happens to have been wounded in World War I and loves to fish and spend time with friends around Horton Bay and Petoskey. It is true that Hemingway used his own life experiences as a starting point for his fiction, but Nick Adams is not Ernest Hemingway, despite their commonalities. In addition to the Nick Adams stories, Hemingway's first published novel, The Torrents of Spring, is set in Michigan. While it contains some wonderful descriptions of Petoskey and the surrounding area, for the most part it is an unsatisfying satire that did little more than allow him to break a publishing contract. But still, it is Hemingway using his Michigan for inspiration. Peppered through his later works are references to Michigan, and it is especially telling that his late-in-life account of Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, has numerous references to Michigan. Clearly, even though he physically left Michigan behind, he continued to be inspired by it for the rest of his life.

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