Ernest Hemingway: Oak Park Protégé

It seems unlikely that the rough-and-tumble writer and adventurer Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in the manicured suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, a town he described as having "wide lawns and narrow minds." He excelled at writing for the high-school paper—a skill that turned into his life's work. A volunteer stint as an ambulance driver introduced him to World War I and its visceral horrors; he used that experience and the lessons he learned as a reporter for the Kansas City Star to craft emotionally complex novels built from deceptively simple sentences, like his masterwork, A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway later lived in Toronto and Chicago. Though his return visits to Oak Park were infrequent, the residents celebrate him there to this day.