Michael R. Federspiel is professor of history at Central Michigan University and serves as the president of the Michigan Hemingway Society.
Northern Michigan was not where your read about nature, it was where you lived with and in it. It was a place where bare feet replaced shoes and where the sounds you heard at night were the wind and birds, not the hum of a crowded suburb. Michigan was also a place of local color where real 'Indians' lived and where the legacy of the wild lumber era was still palatable. And, especially for Ernest, it was a place of solitude. Throughout his life he needed and sought private time to think and contemplate. In Michigan's forests and streams he spent hours - very often alone - observing and experiencing. - From the Introduction