This interview will be on “St. Louis on the Air” over the noon hour Tuesday. This story will be updated after the show. You can listen live.
Ken Burns’ newest documentary, which debuts April 5 on Nine PBS, promises to reveal “the man, the myth, the writer” in the story of its titanic title subject, “Hemingway.”
And that story would be incomplete without the many St. Louisans who inspired and subsidized Ernest Hemingway in his formative years. In fact, a monograph published last year by local historian Andrew J. Theising, “Hemingway’s St. Louis: How St. Louisans Shaped His Life and Legacy,” makes a compelling case that many of Hemingway’s great adventures have roots in this city. That includes not just the three St. Louis women he married, but the St. Louis fortunes that underwrote the adventures they shared. Hemingway’s closest friend, Bill Smith, was also a St. Louis native.
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Constructed around 1790, Taille de Noyer sits today on the campus of McCluer High School.
Today, the name William Wells Brown is mostly remembered by historians studying slavery in pre-Civil War America. But the memoir Brown published in 1847, which detailed his 17 years of bondage before escaping to freedom, was widely read in his day. Like Frederick Douglass (whose own memoir beat Brown s to publication by just two years), he also became a popular lecturer.
But only recently did researchers with the Florissant Valley Historical Society realize that some of the most harrowing incidents in Brown’s memoir took place in north St. Louis County. Brown was forced to work for a slave trader who worked a circuit including Missouri, and he details both the horror of facilitating the trade of other people like himself and the stories of enslaved people in the area whose paths intersected with him.
“In the Walnut Grove: A Consideration of the People Enslaved in and Around Florissant, Missouri” explores the important role enslaved people played in the St. Louis suburb. The book's editor, Andrew J. Theising, discussed it on "St. Louis on the Air."
House, new book tell of St. Louis area's ties to slavery thetelegraph.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thetelegraph.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
ST. LOUIS — The back hardwood stairs of the historic Taille de Noyer, an antebellum home in Florissant, Missouri that started as a two-room log cabin for fur traders, tell