Ernest Hemingway Lived in Key West - embalu
The southernmost point in the continental US has always attracted writers but Papa Hemingway may be the most well known.
Ernest Hemingway’s friend, and fellow writer, John Dos Passos told him about Key West, Florida. Hemingway and his third wife Pauline stopped there on their way home from Paris in 1928, a decision that affected American literature forever. Some of the most famous Ernest Hemingway novels were written there.
The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum.
- In 1931, Pauline’s wealthy uncle helped purchase a house for the couple on Whitehead Street, in the middle of Key West’s Old Town.
- Pauline and Ernest Hemingway divorced in 1939 so that he could marry Martha Gellhorn whom he had met in Sloppy Joe’s, a Key West bar. They moved to Cuba but he kept the house in Key West until he committed suicide 1961.
- Hemingway’s former residence has been preserved as a museum that has become one of the most popular Key West attractions.
- The house and grounds are home to over sixty cats, many of which are polydactyl, or many toed. Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway, also known as Papa Hemingway, once admired a sea captain’s cat that had six toes on its front paws instead of the regular five. The seafarer gave Hemingway the cat and the felines who roam the grounds of the Hemingway Home and Museum today are descended from it.
- While Hemingway lived in the Whitehead Street house, he stuck to a strict writing routine. He worked in the morning while it was cool, writing at a table in his pool house. He wrote some of his most well known works during the Key West Years.
Hemingway Books and Short Stories Written in Key West
- A Farewell to Arms was published in September of 1929. The novel was based on Hemingway’s experiences in World War I including his romance with a British Nurse named Catherine Barkley.
- Death in the Afternoon, a non fiction in depth study of bullfighting, was published in 1932 after Hemingway traveled to France and Spain to research the sport.
- Pauline and Ernest traveled to Africa in 1933 where they went on safari, giving Hemingway the material for his next book, Green Hills of Africa. This same trip was the catalyst for two of Hemingway’s most well known short stories, “ The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”
- Hemingway published Winner Take Nothing, a collection of short stories, in 1933. The book featured “A Clean Well Lighted Place.”
- Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls during the Key West years. The novel was based on his experiences as a jounalist covering the Spanish Civil War.
- Hemingway’s 1937 book, To Have and Have Not, clearly reflects much of his Key West experience. Many of the characters are based on people he knew there.
Hemingway went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize.
Key West is famous for its literary influences and many contemporary writers travel there to drink in the atmosphere, attend seminars and visit Hemingway’s Key West.
Copyright Jan Czech. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.
