121 paper 1 Example

Andre Peltier
Professor Peltier
English 121
10 February 2010
Windemere: The Childhood Summer Home of Ernest Hemingway
The history of the state of Michigan is ripe with art and creativity. From Motown Records in the 1960s to Madonna in the 1980s and from Diego Rivera’s Modernist mural in Detroit to the songs and stories of Native Americans in the Upper Peninsula, the cultural life of our state should never be underestimated. It was in the midst of this cultural history that one of America’s most famous writers spent his summers as he matured into a name among names in American literature. Ernest Hemingway, having written some of the most widely read book of the 20th Century, including To Have and Have Not, A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea, and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, has influenced every generation of American life since the 1920s. Another of his books, the short story collection titled In Our Time, is primarily set in rural Northern Michigan, the same rural north where he spent his childhood summers at the family cottage, Windemere, on Walloon Lake in Emmet County. Although clearly an influential area on his life and works, little has been written about this home, a home built by his father as a small shack in 1899 and then expanded over the years before finally becoming a registered National Historic Landmark in 1968.
If one were to begin to begin writing a Wikipedia page about this home, the obvious place to start would be on the internet. Government sites like www.nps.gov, the official site of the National Parks Service, have information about the process through which any landmark goes before actually being registered. There is no information on the NPS site about Windemere

Peltier 2
though, so looking elsewhere on the web would become necessary. The Michigan State Housing Development Authority has a brief description of the home and the home’s history, including when it was built, when it was added to both the State and National Historic Registers, and when Ernest Hemingway actually lived there.
Aside from the official, government sites, Universities and historical societies offer more information. The Clarke Historical library at Central Michigan University yields a complex history of the home and of its construction with many photographs and side-notes depicting what life would have been like in a small Northern Michigan cottage at the turn of the last century. The Michigan Hemingway Society, an organization dedicated to researching and promoting the influence that Michigan had on his works, also dedicates multiple pages on their web-site to his life on Walloon Lake, and particularly to the time he spent at Windemere. They also provide a link to a PDF file of the full text of Frederick Svorboda’s guide-book, Up North with the Hemingways and Nick Adams, a brief view into the life of the Hemingway family in Northern Michigan.
Once the Universities and historical Societies have been utilized, one should turn to on-line journals as a final web resource. Magazines like Michigan Country Lines On-Line and Home Life: An Up North Magazine have recently published fascinating articles regarding the home and the history of the area. In these articles, Mike Buda and Beth Anne Piehl respectively, demonstrate the contemporary history of the house, information that will work well on a Wikipedia page once it is coupled with the older information from the other sources. A third on-line magazine, Absolute Michigan, published the article, “Michigan History: Up North with the Hemingways,” in 2007. Although there is no author listed on the article, it is still a strong source for information and will work well as another option when preparing the Wikipedia page.

Peltier 3
After spending a little time with a search-engine like Google, it’s important to also turn to something a bit more academic like the MLA Database, a database that collects information about scholarly articles dealing with literature and history. A simple search using “Hemingway” and “Michigan” as keywords returns twenty articles from peer-reviewed journals. The first of which is from the Spring ’09 edition of Hemingway Review,” and the article titled “I Also, Am in Michigan': Pastoralism of Mind in 'Big Two-Hearted River.” This article shows the connections between Hemingway and his short story “Big Two-Hearted River.” This will be important because it makes the link between his writing and his connection to Michigan that is at the center of the Wikipedia page.
Another article found using the MLA Database is called “Hemingway’s Michigan Landscapes,” also from Hemingway Review, but this one is from the Fall ’07 edition. In it, Ron Berman explains the influence Michigan had on Hemingway’s stories in general, not just on “Big Two-Hearted River.” He also explains how the use of landscape in a narrative demands that both the writer and the reader make certain choices, choices that are central to the construction of the plot, central to the interpretation of the narrative, and central to the creation within the writer’s overall canon. It’s these choices, argues Berman, that tie the stories to Michigan and specifically to Windemere; this will again work to explain why Windemere is worthy of a page on Wikipedia.
Along with these two articles, many also exist specifically about his story “Up In Michigan” from his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems. In this book, a book which clearly includes only three stories, the second is specifically about his childhood at Windemere so not only will these articles be of use, but the book itself will also. Furthermore, no Wikipedia entry

Peltier 4
about Windemere would be complete without references to the other stories he wrote about Northern Michigan which can be found in the book The Nick Adams Stories which was collected and published posthumously in 1972. Although it was published after his death, it brings together his Michigan stories in one volume, arranged in such a way as to follow his own wishes.
While his own works are obviously useful for a Wikipedia page, works by other writers like Gloria Whelan, a young adult author living in Northern Michigan might also be of use. The novel The Pathless Woods from 1981 is about a young Ernest Hemingway and his life growing up at Windemere. More recently, Ellen Rosewall published the short story collection Sparkle Island about life on Walloon Lake and features a story titled “Ernest Hemingway Sat Here.” These books will be important because they demonstrate the influence his time at Windemere has had on more contemporary writers, and while Rosewall is a lesser known author, Whelan’s influence should not be underestimated. She won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2000 for her novel The Homeless Bird.
Once the Wikipedian includes some references to recent biographies of Hemingway like A Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross from 1999 and The Hemingway Patrols, Terry Mart’s 2009 biography about Hemingway’s military career, the page will be complete. This information about Windemere will be useful to anyone interested in life in Northern Michigan in general or specifically in Hemingway’s childhood. It’s clear that Windemere was an important part of his youth and that writers, scholars, and general fans alike will enjoy learning more about this historic cottage.