Benton Harbor / St. Joseph, MI

Benton Harbor is a luxury resort featuring mineral baths for treating rheumatism. It is first mentioned when Augie March's big brother Simon gets a summer job there, which turns him into a materialist. Augie himself passes through years once, hitchhiking home to Chicago from Muskegon with Dingbat Einhorn and Nails Nagel, but the resort comes into focus when he accompanies his rich mentor, Mrs. Renling, as part of her ploy to break off his relationship with waitress Willa Steiner. They stay in the luxurious Merritt Hotel, build on the shore of Lake Michigan, in imitation of the opulent Saratoga Springs establishments. Besides bathing, Augie wanders through the surrounding orchards tended by pious, apocalyptic-minded House of David Israelites. At the resort he meets beautiful sisters Esther and Thea Fenchel, is rejected by the former and sought by the second. When the Fenchels check out...