(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Photo Diary: Hemingway House, Key West FL [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2022-12-29 Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century. For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida. Hemingway was born in a suburb of Chicago in 1899, the son of a medical doctor and a music teacher. As a boy he spent a great amount of time in the woods hunting and fishing, gaining an appreciation for natural surroundings that would later accompany much of his work. Upon graduating high school in 1917, his first job was as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, where he learned the distinctive writing style—short punchy sentences, concise paragraphs, and energetic narrative—which would make him famous. When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, Hemingway tried to enlist in the Army and volunteer for duty in France, but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. Instead, he joined the Red Cross and volunteered as an ambulance driver in northern Italy, arriving in June 1918 and carrying wounded soldiers from the front to rear-area field hospitals in a modified Model T truck. After just one month, Hemingway was himself wounded by a mortar shell that left over 200 shrapnel fragments in both legs. It was the end of the war for him, though it earned him a War Merit Cross from the Italian Government. During his months of surgery and recuperation in Milan, the young Hemingway fell in love with one of his nurses, named Agnes von Kurowsky, but was crushed when she finally rejected his advances, harshly declaring that he was too young and she had already become engaged to somebody else. Hemingway would later base his novel A Farewell to Arms on this experience. After his recovery, Hemingway went back to the US and became a reporter for the Toronto Star Weekly and traveled the globe covering international events in Europe. In 1921 he married the first of what would eventually be four wives, but Hemingway was the embodiment of the “alpha male”, he was difficult to get along with, and all of his marriages were plagued by infidelity. However, while traveling in Paris he was able to meet many of the American expat writers of the “Lost Generation”, people like F Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Like him, they had all undergone the searing experience of the First World War and now were going through the Roaring Twenties, and Hemingway expanded his writing to include short stories and novels about his own experiences. His first stories were published in the Transatlantic Review, of which he became editor, and one of his first books, a collection of stories titled In Our Time, was published in Paris and released in New York a year later. This was followed by The Sun Also Rises in 1926. A Farewell to Arms, published in 1929, was his most successful novel and established Hemingway as an important literary figure. Hemingway did not deal well with fame, however. On the one hand, he liked the adulation and recognition, but on the other, he was at heart a loner. During the 1930s he traveled extensively, with sojourns in Spain and Africa. His safari in Tanganyika (what is now Tanzania) resulted in the book Green Hills of Africa, while his experiences in Spain during the Spanish Civil War led to For Whom the Bell Tolls. During this time Hemingway also purchased a house and a fishing boat in Key West FL and lived there for several years, leading him to write To Have and Have Not. As the Second World War approached, Hemingway once again began to travel as a war correspondent, covering the Japanese invasion of China, the London Blitz, and accompanying the troops on D-Day and during the Battle of the Bulge. Returning to his home in Cuba after the war, he wrote the short novella The Old Man and the Sea, which centered on a Cuban fisherman and is probably his most famous story. Hemingway was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the story, and a short time later was given the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. Hemingway, who was living in Havana at the time, had mixed feelings about the Cuban Revolution. He once remarked that he thought the rebellion was a “historical necessity”, but he also spoke critically of Castro's heavy-handed methods. During World War II Hemingway had carried out some secret missions for the OSS (the American forerunner of the CIA) in China, but his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, in which the anti-fascist side was dominated by anarchists and socialists, also led him to offer his services to the NKVD (the Russian forerunner of the KGB) to spy against the Nazis. In 1960, though, Hemingway left Cuba and moved to the remote town of Ketchum ID in the United States. Here, he began to exhibit signs of depression and anxiety, as well as lingering issues from injuries he had suffered during two plane crashes while touring Africa in 1954. Twice he voluntarily committed himself to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and underwent electroshock therapy, but his depression only grew worse. In July 1961, shortly after returning to Ketchum, Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun blast. He was 61. Today Hemingway's life and work are commemorated at the Hemingway House National Historic Site in Key West FL. Key West became a US Navy base in 1823, shortly after Florida became a State. The military base was intended to control and defend the Caribbean trade routes. The barren islands of the Keys presented little economic opportunities for the local civilians, however. Some became fishermen or cigar-makers. But one of the more lucrative (if shady) options was to claim the salvage rights for cargo from the many ships that grounded in the shallow water, then resell it on the mainland at a large profit. These men were known as “wreckers”, and a handful of them became very rich. One of these was Asa Tift. By 1851 Tift was one of the wealthiest men in Florida, and he built a luxurious two-story house in Key West, next to the lighthouse. When he died in 1889 the estate was put up for sale by his widow, but she could not find anyone in the area who was wealthy enough to buy it. So the house sat empty for the next 40 years. In March 1928, Hemingway briefly visited Key West for some fishing before moving on to Kansas City and New York, then returned to the Keys for a couple of winters. In 1931, his wife Pauline's family purchased the old Asa Tift estate in Key West and gave it to Hemingway and Pauline as a wedding gift. It took months to restore and remodel the house, and Hemingway also added a swimming pool and a boxing ring. The pool itself, dug into the solid coral reef limestone, cost over $20,000—more than the house did—and was the only in-ground swimming pool in the Keys. According to legend, when Hemingway found out that Pauline was spending that much on the pool, he angrily took a penny out of his pocket, threw it on the ground, and accused her of “taking his last penny”. She subsequently had the coin cemented into the pool patio, where it can be seen today. Hemingway lived in Key West from 1931 to 1939, following a daily routine of writing for several hours in the morning in his office, built on the second-story loft of the estate's carriage house, then spending the afternoons and evenings fishing out in the Keys on his boat and drinking at nearby Sloppy Joe's Bar. During this time, Hemingway finished a number of works including A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and began the manuscript for For Whom the Bell Tolls. By 1939, Hemingway's marriage to Pauline was failing (mostly due to his affair with a new girlfriend, fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn.) The new couple bought a home in Havana and moved out, leaving Pauline behind. After their divorce, Pauline continued to live in the house until she died in 1951, though it legally remained in Hemingway's name and after her death he stayed there occasionally during trips to Cuba until his suicide in 1961. The estate then went to Hemingway's three sons, and they auctioned it off to a private buyer. It was renovated and opened as a public museum in 1964, and is now one of the most popular tourist sites in Key West. The most famous residents of the house, though, are the cats, most of which are direct descendants of Hemingway’s original polydactyl cats (with six toes). Hemingway liked odd and unusual things, so when a local fishing captain gave him a couple of six-toed cats, he kept them at the mansion. Today almost 60 descendants still live on the grounds, where they are afforded legal protection. Some photos from a visit. For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently wintering in Florida. The house Guided tour Landscaping This fountain was designed by Asa Tift to resemble a Confederate ironclad warship with turret The backyard The bedroom. Plus cat. The kitchen The study One of Hemingway’s portable typewriters Hemingway built an iron catwalk that ran from the main house to the loft, but it was destroyed in a hurricane The loft where Hemingway did most of his writing Inside the loft Hemingway’s writing desk The swimming pool cost almost three times more than the house did One of the polydactyl cats. Currently there are 58 of them at the house. A watering trough for the cats, made from an Italian oil jar and a ceramic urinal from the Sloppy Joe’s Bar [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/12/29/2142338/-Photo-Diary-Hemingway-House-Key-West-FL Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/