Harvard University Press Blog

Tips for Teaching What You Don't Know

Everyone in academia knows it and no one likes to admit it: faculty often have to teach courses in areas that they don’t know very well. With the fall term rapidly approaching, we’ve invited Therese Huston to share some strategies for teaching new material. Huston is the founding Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Seattle University, and the author of Teaching What You Don’t Know, a practical guide for making it through the anxiety of teaching outside one’s specialty. In this first installment of a three-part series, Huston starts at the beginning: designing the course.

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The word “professor” is almost synonymous with “expert.” We each work diligently for years to acquire specialized knowledge, to become a trusted authority in our discipline, and to make insightful judgments about our chosen craft. To be an academic is, at its core, to be an expert.

And thankfully, much of the time, our teaching aligns nicely with our expertise. If you’re a botanist, you teach about plants, and if you’re an expert on ancient Greek philosophy, you teach about Plato. (At least in a good economy, you teach about Plato). When all is well with the world, we teach what we know best.

But what if you’ve been assigned to teach a topic that sits outside of your expertise, a course that spills into areas you haven’t yet mastered? What if you’re a botanist whose been assigned to teach “Introduction to Zoology?” or a Plato expert who’s been nudged into two sections of “Ethics of the Internet?” If I’ve just described your situation, you might be worried that you’re going to spend the term just a chapter ahead of your students.

Welcome to the club. I hope you won’t be disappointed, but it’s hardly an exclusive one. Faculty from the most cutting-edge research institutions (think Harvard, Stanford, and Ohio State) to the most teaching-focused small colleges (think Carleton and Bowdoin Colleges) confide that at one point or another, they have found themselves teaching outside of their expertise. For some faculty, it happens in their first or second year of teaching, and for others, it’s a startling turn of events mid- or late career.

In this three-part series, I’ll offer some best practices and findings from the research literature on how to teach material you’re still mastering. With the right approach, you’ll spend more of your time teaching clearly and effectively and much less time worrying and preparing material that you’ll never get a chance to teach.

We’ll start today with some tips on designing the course.

Perhaps you’ve been designing your course all summer. Perhaps you’ve just started. Either way, you want your students to have an effective learning experience and you don’t want to drown in the process. There are two critical steps you can take before the course begins to ensure that your course is well-designed and you’re ready for the deepest waters.

First, find five syllabi you like. The Internet makes quick work of such research, and it’s the best 60 minutes you’ll spend in the planning stages. Comparing syllabi from five different professors (presumably professors who do have expertise in the topic) tells you what the fundamental readings and concepts should be, how those concepts are typically sequenced, and where you might turn for additional information. You should look for syllabi that are from institutions similar to your own. If you’re at a state college, for instance, you could include one syllabus from an Ivy League school if it inspires you, but if all five syllabi are from schools with different expectations of students and faculty, you could be setting yourself up for an untenable workload and many student complaints.

Framing Muslims in Norway

Details are still emerging about last week’s tragic attacks in Norway, and about Anders Behring Breivik, the 32-year old who has confessed to the killings. In a press conference today Breivik was described by his attorney as a “very cold” person who sees himself as a warrior, fighting for a cause others can’t yet understand. As is clear from Breivik’s 1,500 page manifesto, his war is against Europe’s increasing multiculturalism, and what Breivik sees as Islamic domination of the West.

Breivik’s turn to violence is shocking and deeply disturbing, but many have noted that the ideas animating his rampage aren’t original to him. Instead, his beliefs reflect what’s been an increasingly mainstream backlash against multiculturalism in Europe. Just two weeks ago we heard from Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, authors of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11, on the anti-multicultural rhetoric of recent months. From our conversation:

The strength of recent political pronouncements can in part be understood as a phase in a cycle that involves scapegoating so-called “outsiders” at times of economic and social crisis. It’s no coincidence that the leaders have picked up on this now when there’s a global recession and their policies appear to be ineffectual in the face of larger forces.  

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However, there’s also been a sense in these countries that large-scale migrations are the cause of social tensions and crisis. Again, dominant political discourses can use this sense to their own ends. For example, in the 2010 British General Election all parties were suddenly keen to appear tough on the issue of immigration, based largely on the unproven claim that extremism of both right wing and Islamist kinds was being allowed to fester because politicians had fought shy of the issue in the past. Inasmuch as there is any evidence of widespread popular concern about multiculturalism, you often tend to find the sentiment strongest in areas with comparatively little experience of direct immigration into local neighborhoods. This suggests that this kind of anxiety is second-hand, as it were, and generated by press and media coverage which often takes its cue from political agendas and is sometimes quite hysterical in tone.

In the case of Norway, an oil-rich country with virtually no unemployment, it’s worth noting that economic factors likely haven’t played the same role as in Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Instead, Breivik saw himself as fighting a social and cultural war against immigration, Marxism, and Muslims. And though Breivik is being depicted mostly as a lone-wolf and as possibly mentally ill, pundits such as the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat are rushing to point out that while Breivik’s “crimes should be denounced and disowned, their ideological pedigree has to be admitted.” Indeed, rather than seek to distance themselves from Breivik’s ideology, Douthat suggests that mainstream anti-multiculturalists should stand firm, not allowing their views to be overshadowed by this violence.

There’s still too much unknown to speculate about connections between mainstream rhetoric and Breivik’s actions, but neither should we dismiss the notion that a climate of political finger pointing can inspire violent acts. As Morey and Yaqin note in Framing Muslims:

It would be naïve in the extreme not to recognize that the incessant demonization of Muslims and their cultural practices by those with access to the major vehicles of public discourse in the West has indirectly given a green light to prejudice and vigilantism.

It’s important to hold that demonization to account, and so we shouldn’t forget the immediate and shameful inclination to assume Muslim responsibility for the attacks in Norway that surfaced before any actual details were known. By Friday evening, a Washington Post column was announcing that the attacks were “a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.” The column, by Jennifer Rubin, took the attacks as an opportunity to chide “irresponsible lawmakers” who “would have us believe that al-Qaeda is almost caput and that we can wrap up things in Afghanistan.” Not until the following day did the Post address the column’s framing of Muslims, well after it was clear that the attacks were not, in fact, the work of jihadists. But their update can’t rightly be called a retraction or apology:

That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.

From any angle, these attacks were tragic and horrifying. The tragedy should not be compounded by mobilizing Breivik’s actions in a call for greater scrutiny of the group that was his target.

A Classics Quiz

In the name of summer fun and high school Latin flashbacks (yikes, when did those become the same thing?) we’ve put together a little quiz to test your knowledge of the classics. For those of you with any sort of classics background, it shouldn’t be too challenging. For the rest of us, well, there’s always the Loeb Classical Library, which marks its centennial this year. And if five hundred volumes of facing-page translation feels a bit daunting, just dive on in with our Loeb Classical Library Reader. That’s what it’s there for.

Okay, on to the quiz. Multiple choice, even. Answers below.

1) Which epic hero is the son of Peleus?

Aeneas; Achilles; Hector; Odysseus

2) Which work of ancient philosophy ends with the myth of Er?

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; Lucretius, De rerum natura; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations; Plato, The Republic

3) Which ancient historian calls his work a “possession for ever”? 

Herodotus; Polybius; Tacitus; Thucydides

4) Who expresses amatory ambivalence with the words odi et amo?

Catullus; Propertius; Sappho; Tibullus

5) Which ancient lyricist said “Go tell the Spartans”?

Bacchylides; Euripides; Pindar; Simonides

6) Which Virgilian work bears the alternative title Boucolica?

The Aeneid; The Eclogues; The Georgics; The Idylls

7) Which Sophoclean character has killed Laius?

Ajax; Antigone; Clytemnestra; Oedipus

8) Who blamed banishment on a poem and an impropriety?

Lucan; Ovid; Petronius; Seneca

9) Who laid claim to a poetic monument longer lasting than bronze?

Aeschylus; Ennius; Hesiod; Horace

10) Who composed the ancient history commonly called the Ab urbe condita?

Dio Cassius; Livy; Sallust; Xenophon

 

 

Answers:

1) Achilles 2) Plato, Republic 3) Thucydides 4) Catullus 5) Simonides 6) The Eclogues 7) Oedipus 8) Ovid 9) Horace 10) Livy

Daniel Lieberman on The Fastest Human Ever

We publish books on such a wide variety of topics that it can often feel like experts on everything are just an email away. We’ll see news stories and wonder, by reflex, what this or that author might have to say about them. “Oh, that’s an interesting take. Let’s get Dr. X on the line for some context.” Or, “That story makes no sense, let’s see if Professor Y can explain.”

That’s exactly what happened the other day when I saw this Chuck Klosterman story on Grantland asking “Is The Fastest Human Ever Already Alive?” The story begins with Usain Bolt, the dominating Jamaican sprinter, Olympic gold medalist, and holder of multiple world records. Klosterman notes the incredible downward trend of sprint times over the last two decades and speculates that, superhuman as they seem now, Bolt’s times could look pedestrian in as few as ten years.

These downward trends can’t continue forever though, because, as Klosterman notes, we can’t expect that a human will eventually run 100 meters in 0 seconds flat. So, working from the assumption that we’ll eventually hit the limit of what’s possible for human speed, Klosterman tries to figure out how close we’ve gotten to the limit, and whether the fastest human ever could possibly already be alive. Not quite as Klostermany as a few weeks back when he tried to apply the sports metric “value over replacement player” to rock musicians, but still pretty Klostermany.

So, anyway, three paragraphs into the article I’m wondering what Daniel Lieberman would have to say about this line of inquiry. Lieberman is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, and author of The Evolution of the Human Head, which we published earlier this year. This is right up his alley, let’s send him an email.

But then I kept reading and—look at that—Lieberman pops up towards the end of the story. Way to go, media! And, unsurprisingly to people familiar with his work, Lieberman seems to demur on the question of the upper limits of human speed, because speed just isn’t what we’re built for:

“It’s useful to keep in mind that we should not be too impressed by Bolt and other speedsters. By mammalian standards, they are comparatively slow. Most decent quadrupeds out there—dogs, horses, zebra, lions—can run about 20 meters per second, twice as fast as Bolt, and they can do so for much longer (up to a few minutes). No Olympic sprinter could ever outrun a lion. We humans gave up the ability to run fast by mammalian standards many millions of years ago when we became bipeds and lost the ability to gallop. Instead, what humans excel at is endurance, especially on a hot day.”

In other words: “Think you’re fast? Go race a lion.” Sobering perspective from an expert.

And Lieberman’s very much the expert. We somehow seem to have not shared this video here before, so take a look now. Daniel Lieberman on barefoot running:

 

Auctioning Jane

Manuscript pages from Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons sold at auction yesterday to the Bodleian library at Oxford for nearly one million pounds. To understand why these pages are so significant, we contacted Robert Morrison with a few questions. Morrison is Queen’s National Scholar at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, and the editor of our annotated edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion, forthcoming this fall.

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Q: Little survives of Austen’s manuscripts, and it’s unlikely that more will turn up. What has this scarcity meant for scholars studying Austen?

It has certainly meant that we prize the manuscripts that do exist. Manuscripts provide a unique opportunity for us to watch a writer’s mind in motion. Anyone who reads or studies Austen is bound to wonder how she put those sentences together. Where did it come from? How did she do it? The Watsons manuscript is fascinating to me not just because of what Austen wrote, but because of what she crossed out.

It is the same with the manuscript from Persuasion that I worked on when preparing the annotated edition for HUP. [A page of the manuscript is pictured at right.] Austen originally concluded Persuasion in July 1816, but three weeks later she cancelled the final two chapters and replaced them with the last three chapters of the published novel. The two cancelled chapters are the only section from any of her published novels to have survived in manuscript, and they offer highly illuminating evidence of her methods of composition and revision.

Austen’s prose can seem effortless. The manuscripts from The Watsons and Persuasion remind us how hard she worked at writing well.

Q: It’s speculated that Austen abandoned The Watsons because its plot began to run uncomfortably parallel to her own life. What do you make of that?

I think such speculations are accurate, though I don’t think they tell the whole story. Austen seems to have stopped working on the manuscript shortly before the invalid Mr. Watson was to die. This seems very likely to have been because at roughly the same moment in her own life her father died, and she could not describe Mr. Watson’s death without bringing fully into view her own father’s death. This cut too close to the bone, and so she put the manuscript down.

Why, however, did she not go back to the novel in later years, when the pain of her father’s death had receded? I think the answer is because she could see clearly how difficult it would be to find a satisfactory resolution to her plot. The thing that always strikes me on reading The Watsons is how grim it all is. There are a few flashes of light, and a great number of shadows. The novel possesses very little of the wit and irony that shapes her published work. If Austen could have seen a way forward, I think she would have pursued it. But the manuscript was too heavy and too cheerless. One of the reasons The Watsons is so fascinating is that it is the start of the most autobiographical novel Austen ever wrote, and it throws searching light on the difference between her life and her art.

Q: These pages from The Watsons sold for nearly one million pounds, about three times more than what was expected. Are you surprised at all by that number? What does it signal for you about Austen’s continued appeal?

From one perspective, that is an astonishing number. But from another it really seems hardly surprising. We have lots of Wordsworth manuscripts, lots of Keats manuscripts, lots of Lawrence manuscripts, lots of Woolf manuscripts. One of the reasons the price is so high is that there is no manuscript material related to Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, or Emma. So when an Austen manuscript—even from an unpublished and incomplete novel—comes on the market, it is bound to attract lots of attention.

But more than this, Austen’s cultural currency is very high and it continues to climb. For many people, her novels shape everything from what we think the past might have been like (it wasn’t, by the way) to what we mean when we say we have “fallen in love.” Thanks especially to movie versions of her books, to “fall in love” today still means in many ways to fall in love like Elizabeth and Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, or—for me—like Anne and Wentworth from Persuasion, which I think is Austen’s greatest novel, and certainly her most modern and compelling love story. From this perspective, one million pounds for an Austen manuscript seems a bargain!

Muslims and Multicultural Backlash

In recent months, mainstream European leaders of nations like Germany, England, and the Netherlands have been fiercely critical of their countries’ policies of multiculturalism. After some of the political rhetoric intensified around last week’s anniversary of the 7/7 attacks in the UK, we discussed the situation with Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, in the exchange posted below. Morey and Yaqin are the authors of Framing Muslims: Stereotyping And Representation After 9/11, and the leaders of the Framing Muslims project, an international research network exploring the representation of Muslim identities in contemporary cultural discourse. Their book examines the creation and dissemination of those representations in different Western nations, and the effects of the gap between the representations and realities.

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Q: There’s a newly invigorated backlash against multiculturalism sweeping through parts of Western Europe. Where do you think this new vehemence is coming from, and what’s your reaction to it?

The strength of recent political pronouncements can in part be understood as a phase in a cycle that involves scapegoating so-called “outsiders” at times of economic and social crisis. It’s no coincidence that the leaders have picked up on this now when there’s a global recession and their policies appear to be ineffectual in the face of larger forces.

Like so much of the debate around multiculturalism, there is often no clarity in the way the term is used by the press and politicians—although “state multiculturalism” is berated, such speakers seldom take the time to actually give any examples of this insidious phenomenon which is supposedly undermining Western Society.

However, there’s also been a sense in these countries that large-scale migrations are the cause of social tensions and crisis. Again, dominant political discourses can use this sense to their own ends. For example, in the 2010 British General Election all parties were suddenly keen to appear tough on the issue of immigration, based largely on the unproven claim that extremism of both right wing and Islamist kinds was being allowed to fester because politicians had fought shy of the issue in the past. Inasmuch as there is any evidence of widespread popular concern about multiculturalism, you often tend to find the sentiment strongest in areas with comparatively little experience of direct immigration into local neighborhoods. This suggests that this kind of anxiety is second-hand, as it were, and generated by press and media coverage which often takes its cue from political agendas and is sometimes quite hysterical in tone.

So, it’s partly to do with genuine fears and partly to do with political convenience.

Q. Your book, Framing Muslims, is about the ways that Muslims are represented (you use the word “caricatured”) in media and popular culture. Are those representations functionally distinct from how Muslims are represented by government speech and policy? If so, how do you think the two inform one another?

There is a strong connection between political and media and popular cultural discourses around Muslims. However, this relationship isn’t straightforward or easy. On one level, it seems self-evident that the weight of negative depictions since 9/11 has led to hostile views of Islam and correspondingly aggressive actions.

A Round of DAREderdash

We published the first volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English back in 1985. Volumes came every few years after that, and next year we’ll finally roll out Volume V, which will take us alphabetically from Si through Z.

Just last week Joan Houston Hall, the Chief Editor for the series, announced via Twitter that all of the data for DARE Volume V has been delivered to us at the Press. To celebrate that milestone, let’s have a little Balderdash-style fun. You guys know Balderdash, yeah? Toss out an obscure word, everybody makes up their own definitions, then they’re read aloud along with the actual definition and each player has to guess which one is correct. We stole part of the fun and made up the fakes, so you just have to guess the real definitions. All of these words came via the @darewords Twitter account, which you really should be following.

All right, let’s play some DAREderdash. Answers are below.

all horns and rattles:

(a) very angry

(b) in heat

(c) lacking depth or substance

(d) noisy

foop:

(a) a variety of fungus

(b) to dance uninhibitedly

(c) generic term for sugary cereal

(d) to make a mistake, to flub

blind tiger:

(a) one who lashes out indiscriminately

(b) a game of hide-and-seek played in the dark

(c) a speakeasy

(d) a practical joke

guffins:

(a) very large feet

(b) pigeons

(c) fussy toddlers

(d) jokers

footermans:

(a) on foot

(b) cement workers

(c) podiatrists

(d) soccer players

Insects and Delicacy

Everyone knows you have to be delicate with insects. Most of us have probably made the mistake of handling the wings of butterflies or moths, accidentally removing some of their “dust,” which is actually comprised of the scales that they need to fly. Who hasn’t, as a child, been a little too careless and mauled a ladybug? Or, among those of us who were lucky enough to grow up in regions they populate, let curiosity get the better of us when handling a lightning bug or firefly? You have to be delicate with insects.

Well, here’s some insect news requiring a slightly different brand of delicacy. As Science put it in a story last week: “Tiny Bug Makes a Riot With Its Privates.” Or, in the words of the BBC: “‘Singing penis’ sets noise record for water insect.”

That’s right. From the BBC story:

Scientists from France and Scotland recorded the aquatic animal “singing” at up to 99.2 decibels, the equivalent of listening to a loud orchestra play while sitting in the front row.

The insect makes the sound by rubbing its penis against its abdomen in a process known as “stridulation”.

Researchers say the song is a courtship display performed to attract a mate.

On average, the songs of M. scholtzi reached 78.9 decibels, comparable to a passing freight train.

First off, let’s note that “stridulation” is not actually defined as “rubbing genitalia against belly.” Mark Denny and Alan McFadzean explain in their book Engineering Animals: How Life Works, in a chapter on animal communication:

Sound is just a vibration: to make it you have to move things. Most insects and other noisy arthropods achieve this by stridulation—rubbing one body part against another. Generally this action involves a body part that acts as a file and another that acts as a pick: ideally the pick is connected to some sort of resonant structure, such as wing panels. The file is dragged across the pick (or vice-versa) and a noise is generated.

So this bug, the Micronecta scholtzi, a freshwater insect that measures just 2mm, is stridulating its way to the rumble of a freight train. The scientists who made the discovery say that if body size is taken into account then the M. scholtzi are the loudest animals on earth. The fact that the bug makes this call underwater explains why scientists are just now noting its extraordinary volume, as 99% of the sound is lost when transferring from water to air.

In his recent book Cricket Radio: Tuning In the Night-Singing Insects, John Himmelman explains everything about the calling of crickets and katydids, the singing insects we’re likely most familiar with. Crickets and katydids stridulate with their legs, a more common variation than is practiced by the M. scholtzi. In crickets the file and pick, or scraper, are together referred to as the “stridulary organ,” but in the case of the M. scholtzi that begins to sound like a bit of a euphemism. Himmelman also explains that some grasshoppers engage in a different kind of noisemaking, known as “crepitation,” in which the rapid opening of the hind wings creates a crackling sound.

We built a web page that lets you hear the different calls of some of Himmelman’s crickets. Have a listen to them, and then go hear what the M. scholtzi sounds like, courtesy of the BBC. It’s sort of like a maraca. Not so delicate after all.

Serena Mayeri on Reasoning from Race

This Spring we published Serena Mayeri’s Reasoning from Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution. The book looks at how analogies between sex and race discrimination became a key strategy in the legal battle for women’s rights in the 1960s and ’70s, though one that Mayeri shows to have been complicated from its very beginning.

The University of Pennsylvania Law School, where Mayeri is Assistant Professor of Law and History, recently produced the following short video interview with Mayeri about her book. A partial transcript is below.

 

Serena Mayeri: The book is called Reasoning from Race, and what I mean by that is a number of different strategies that feminists used during the 1960s and ‘70s to make the case that sex discrimination was a problem that was worthy of attention.

The most fun part of researching and writing this book was the opportunity to have access to the papers of various individuals and groups who were involved in the litigation and legislative campaigns and other advocacy efforts that I’m talking about. I looked at the papers of individuals like Pauli Murray, who is a central figure in my story - she was an African American lawyer who pioneered these race-sex analogies as the reasoning for the race strategy in the early ‘60s up through the early ’70s, which was then picked up by people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, now a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, who litigated a lot of the sex equality cases in the 1970s.

One case that I found particularly fascinating in my research was a challenge by a young African American woman, Katie Mae Andrews, to a policy in New Orleans where the schools districts banned unwed mothers from teaching school. Miss Andrews wanted to be a teacher and she went to a local civil rights attorney, who then collaborated with feminists at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. They made arguments to the federal court in Mississippi, and later took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But when it got there, the very rich intersections between race and sex and sexuality and employment and reproductive freedom were bleached out of the case. And I use this case as an example to show how, in many instances, African American women plaintiffs brought really pivotal sex equality cases to the courts, only to find that by the time they reached the Supreme Court, the really compelling aspects of their case were obscured.

One of the things I’m trying to do in the book is to dispel what I think is the myth about 1970s feminist legal advocacy - that feminists were very focused on the concerns of white middle class women, not concerned with racial justice or with economic justice, or with the connections between reproductive freedom and economic and racial equality.

What came out of the Supreme Court was not what feminists put in, but was something much more limited – a much less capacious vision of equality than what feminists were advancing. And I hope that my book, along a number of different dimensions, can give a richer picture of what feminists did present to the court, much of which was rejected, but is still, I think, really worthy of being exhumed.

Becoming Hemingway

Fifty years ago this week Ernest Hemingway shot himself dead in his Idaho home. Though parodied often (and as recently as in Woody Allen’s new Midnight in Paris), there’s no debating the impact of Hemingway’s outsize personality and distinctive prose. Below, in an essay from our New Literary History of America, the author Keith Taylor considers Hemingway’s style and its roots.

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Hemingway’s Paradise, Hemingway’s Prose

Keith Taylor

By 1943, just three years after the enormous success of For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway was already an iconic figure, as much a captive of his public image as he was its creator. The war in Europe was not his war, despite his slightly comic, albeit officially sanctioned efforts to turn his fishing boat, the Pilar, into a submarine destroyer for hunting German U-boats off the coast of Cuba. His third wife, Martha Gellhorn, was taken more seriously as a war correspondent than the forty-four-year-old novelist could hope to be until he got back to Europe. She would soon leave him. While thanking his sister Ursula for her birthday greetings that year, he said he remembered “the smell of cedars” in the northern forest, but he knew he couldn’t return to the idyllic place in his memory.

“Windemere,” with all its connections to the romantic poets and their English Lake District, was the name of the family cottage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan. Dr. Clarence Hemingway bought the land in 1899, the same year his first son was born in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Every summer the mother and children would leave Oak Park as soon as school was out, head north by steamer to Harbor Springs, Michigan, then take a train to the village of Walloon Lake, where a boat would run them the several miles down the lake to their cottage. The family would stay as long as they could before heading back to their suburban life and the confines of school and winter. Hemingway spent every summer of his childhood at Walloon Lake, learning to hunt and fish, first from his father and then from the children of the local native people who still lived in “Indian camps” around the lakes, usually working as barkpeelers for the logging businesses or as day laborers for the new group of upper-middle-class “summer people” who, like the Hemingways, were beginning to buy up the land. Although that northern landscape had been devastated by loggers in the previous generation and by the fires that had burned through the slash left behind, for Hemingway it became an Edenic image, wild and free from parental or institutional control, that would recur in his work throughout his writing life. It was there that he learned to be confident in the natural world, where he learned the specific names for plants and animals, and where he learned about the relationships between them. After being severely wounded while serving as an ambulance driver attached to the Italian army during World War I, Hemingway returned to northern Michigan to recover, and he was married there to his first wife, Hadley Richardson, in 1921. He left shortly after and never returned, most likely because of ongoing disagreements with his mother and his uncomfortable relationship with his increasingly fragile father. It is also likely that he didn’t want the altered environment to sully his childhood memory of the place that became central to his first stories.

He wrote most of those early stories about the northern forest while living in Paris; they would become part of the collection In Our Time, as published in 1925. While working on them, Hemingway developed the prose style that he would use for the rest of his life, a style that would be much parodied, yet would remake the expectations for English prose for the rest of that century. The declarative directness of the sentences Hemingway was using was certainly influenced by his early stints as a journalist and by his childhood education in the importance of the specifics of nature, but his real discovery came from combining the partial examples of several major modernist figures into a style that a general audience was now ready to accept. From Sherwood Anderson he learned the power of a simple unadorned sentence. Gertrude Stein provided the example of repetition and parallel construction, although, unlike Stein, Hemingway would never push those techniques toward pure sound and away from their connections to character and narrative. From Ezra Pound he learned a larger sense of the music words could make, received a lesson in the rigor of the written arts, and internalized Pound’s dictum that “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” From Ford Madox Ford—for whom the young Hemingway worked at the Transatlantic Review, a small literary journal then published in Paris—he absorbed the Flaubertian demand for le mot juste, the almost mystical belief that the perfect word could be found for any particular situation.