Hemingway’s Uncle Tyler’s House
3629 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri 64111, United States
When Hemingway arrived in Kansas City in October 1917, he stayed briefly with his Uncle Tyler and Aunt Arabell in their Victorian-style house at 3629 Warwick Boulevard in Kansas City. A few months earlier, Uncle Tyler, a lumber executive, had told Hemingway’s father that he could get Ernest a job with the Kansas City Star and that Ernest could live at his house until he was “well started”. Tyler Hemingway had been classmates with the Star’s chief editorial writer, Henry J. Haskell, and did indeed use his influence to get his nephew a job as a cub reporter with the newspaper.
Hemingway arrived in Kansas City from Chicago on Monday, 15th October 1917 and, if only for a brief period, took up the offer to stay with his aunt and uncle at their new home in Warwick Boulevard. Until earlier that year they had been living only a short distance away at 3705 Walnut Street – unfortunately, that house no longer exists. Aunt Arabell wanted Ernest to stay at their new home until the end of the week.
Unfortunately, Hemingway found his Uncle Tyler vain, pompous, humourless and very much full of himself. To his mother, Grace Hemingway, he later wrote that he really liked Aunt Arabell but Uncle Tyler’s immense egoism really annoyed him. At any rate, he had no intention of staying the rest of the week at their house. He needed to be independent of them to more freely explore and enjoy this new city. He had always intended to move into a room with his friend, Carl Edgar, who was living and working in Kansas City, but that wouldn’t happen until December. Within a few days of arriving at his uncle’s house, he moved out to Mrs Haynes’s boarding house, only a block up the street. Despite this, he often had dinner with his aunt and uncle, as he mentioned in letters home.
Unfortunately, Alfred Tyler Hemingway’s former home at 3629 Warwick Boulevard no longer exists either. It appears to have been demolished around 2008 following a fire. This is the only photo of the house that I’ve been able to find, clearly taken after the fire:
Sadly, all that remains now is a vacant lot – but next to that is an apartment complex named, appropriately, Hemingway Heights, perhaps commemorating the author’s connection with the area … or possibly his Uncle’s connection with the area. Unlikely? Well, at 3740 Warwick Boulevard, only a few minutes walk away, is an apartment complex called … Arabell.
Hemingway’s Uncle Tyler died of pneumonia only four years later at the age of 44. At the time, the Kansas City Star praised him as a good-humour man who loved life and who wasn’t too busy to serve his church, the cause of education, or to take part in municipal progress. Clearly, the writer had a much higher opinion of Hemingway’s uncle than Ernest himself had a few years earlier. Alfred Tyler Hemingway is buried at Mount Washington Cemetery in Independence, Missouri.
Hemingway’s Aunt Arabell married again in 1927, this time to Clarence Erasmus Shepard, and moved to a larger house in Mission Hills, Kansas, where Hemingway and his wife Pauline stayed briefly in 1928 and 1931 during Pauline’s pregnancies.
Arabell Hemingway died in 1963, two years after the suicide of her famous nephew. She’s buried next to her first husband, Hemingway’s Uncle Tyler, at Mount Washington Cemetery.
The Literary Tourist 