Hemingway's Home
Key West, Florida
Artists and writers have found Key West an ideal place to let their
creative juices flow. Here Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie,
Night of the Iguana, and The Rose Tattoo. Robert Frost spent time
here also. But the most famous and longest in residence was Ernest
Hemingway who made Key West his home while married to wife number 2 from
1930 to 1940. Here he created a study accessible only by a catwalk
from the main house where he did much of his best writing like Death in
the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, The Snows of
Kilimanjaro, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, among others.
His wife built the first swimming pool, a salt water pool, in Key
West in the late 1930's at a cost of $20,000. The grounds are home
to cats who are direct descendants of Hemingway’s nearly 50 cats, some
of whom are “the famed six toed cats.” Papa Hemingway was a rough
old codger whose idiosyncratic life is idealized by the tour guides, but
the visit was interesting and informative. |
