The Big Read at Kansas City Public Library

In honor of NaBloPoMo, we here at Big Read HQ will strive to post one entry per day to our Big Read Blog for the month. Or until we run out of things to say about Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Liberty Memorial, and Kansas City. Or until the Big Read is over.

Feel free to help us in our quest to post for thirty days straight. It’s not as hard as it looks to do something for thirty days. Remember that guy who ate fast food for a month? We are asking for something much healthier and better for your brain.

Let’s get the party started with the woman behind the nurse. Agnes von Kurowsky served as the basis for Hemingway’s British nurse, Catherine Barkley.

She served in the American Red Cross and nursed Hemingway while he convalesced at a hospital in Milan. Ernest Hemingway fell wildly in love with von Kurowsky and wanted to marry her. Hemingway returned to the States after the war was over and expected von Kurowsky to join him there. He wrote her numerous marriage proposals, but not long after his return home, she sent him a letter ending their relationship.

Scholars agree that von Kurowsky’s rejection of Hemingway was a seminal point in his development as a writer and his recurring themes of romantic loss. “In book after book and story after story, lovers are separated by misunderstandings, cooled passions, insanity and death.”

Fun fact about Agnes von Kurowsky: Her very first job out of school was as a cataloguer for the public library in Washington, D.C. She worked there for four years before attending nursing school. In her words, “The library was too slow and uneventful. My taste ran to something more exciting.”