In 1898, the year before Ernest Hemingway was born, his parents bought 200 feet of frontage on Walloon Lake in northern Michigan, out in the backlands of Petoskey, a coastal resort town. The Hemingways were fresh off a luxury steamship from Oak Park, Ill., looking to chuck the suburban grind for the seasonal joys of lake country. For $400 they soon had a 20- by 40-foot clapboard cottage built that was short on nearly every amenity except peace and quiet. It wasn’t pioneer life — they had brought along a maid — but the surrounding woods were populated by Ojibwe Indians, black bears, lumberjacks and bootleggers. Most crucially for “Ernie,” who would eventually pack all this stuff into his fiction, the fishing was extraordinary.

“Absolutely the best trout fishing in the country. No exaggeration,” he later wrote to a friend about the Petoskey area, perhaps exaggerating a tad but hitting on an essential truth of summer in the Michigan boonies: “It’s a great place to laze around and swim and fish when you want to. And the best place in the world to do nothing. It is beautiful country … And nobody knows about it but us.”

By all accounts, northern Michigan had a seismic effect on Ernest Hemingway and his future work. He spent his first 21 summers there, fishing, hunting, drinking and chasing girls. It was a place where men lived hard and lean, ran trotlines and considered bilge water a beverage. “Good stuff for essays,” he wrote in a 1916 journal entry, recording fishing trip details he would later channel into Nick Adams stories. “Old Couple on Boardman,” he wrote, referring to a river. “Mancelona-Indian girl, Bear Creek … tough talking lumberjack, young Indian girl, kills self and girl.”

It’s an odd juxtaposition to think of Hemingway, years later, sipping espresso in Paris cafes while writing about Nick Adams — a semi-autobiographical stand-in for the author’s own manly wanderings in the Michigan wilds. Take the famous Adams story “Big Two-Hearted River”: “Holding the rod far out toward the uprooted tree and sloshing backward in the current,” he wrote, “Nick worked the trout, plunging, the rod bending alive, out of the danger of the weeds into the open river.”