Leicester and Ernest Hemingway: Brothers in Arms
He was more like his brother than he could ever have imagined…
Leicester Hemingway was Ernest’s junior by sixteen years, which in sibling terms made him, with three older sisters — and with Ernest away in Europe before Leicester could even walk — something of an only child in the large Hemingway home at 600 North Kenilworth Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois.
With a domineering mother, and three sisters still at home, as well as a doctor father out most of the day making calls, and grandparents who, as they grew older, called less, one can imagine Leicester finding corners of the house he might call his own, playing with his brother’s toys, looking at his brother’s books, perhaps even trying on his brother’s clothes, creating a world of his own as he waited for his big brother to come home.
And his big brother did come home from The Great War in 1918, still recovering from the severe leg wounds received courtesy of an Austrian mortar shell and machine gun fire in northern Italy just a few months earlier.
The nineteen year old Ernest Hemingway soon became a bit of hero in the wealthy Chicago suburb, and his little brother loved him with all his heart. Ernest called him ‘Leicester de Pester’, later shortened to ‘The Pest’.
