The Hemingway Home & Museum
To the seasoned literary tourist*, the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum might seem too obvious a choice to launch a series about the best writer homes, haunts, and hubs around the world. After all, if you were to ask a film buff for their highest recommendation for a weekend watch, they’d probably be tempted to offer up something obscure, something truly off the beaten path … but ultimately, they’d likely tell you to watch The Godfather. And rightly so.
You could remove Hemingway from the equation, and you’d still be left with a stunning piece of architecture. —Zachary Petit
Rob O’Neal
*One with inherent nerd-like proclivities to festoon any travel itinerary with detours to anything and everything writing-related within an ultimately forgiving proximity.
When it comes to the Godfather of American letters, you’ve gotta hand it to Papa. Because in the end, story trumps all—and his incredible house in Key West, Fla., is where a key part of his literary legacy, and his legend as we know it today, was truly forged.
When Hemingway came to the island in April 1928 for the first time, he wasn’t yet the larger-than-life novelist. Rather, he was a journalist and war correspondent who had just published The Sun Also Rises—and, well, he didn’t really have a great fortune under his belt (something not wholly unfamiliar to many the working journalist). But with his wife Pauline, what he did have was an Uncle Gus—and Uncle Gus had given the couple a brand-new Ford Roadster. Problem was, it wasn’t ready yet, so Hemingway and his wife hunkered down in a Key West apartment for a few weeks. (Where Hemingway sat down and banged out A Farewell to Arms, as one does.)
Away from his typewriter, he palled up with hardware store owner Charles Thompson, who introduced him to big-game fishing. Coupled with the quaintness of the community, the Hemingways became smitten with the town—and in 1931, Uncle Gus bought a dilapidated 80-year-old house for $8,000 in
back taxes, and gave it to them, as one does.
Today, the fruits of their restoration work dazzle. You could remove Hemingway from the equation, and you’d still be left with a stunning piece of architecture. The foundation of the Spanish Colonial home was built from the very fabric of the island, the native limestone beneath it. Floor-to-ceiling windows connect the property to the verdant city outside. Original wrought-iron frames the all-encompassing balconies.
The Hemingway Home
Rob O’Neal
And stepping inside, you are transported to the world of the Hemingways in the ’30s.
“I always joke around that Spain and Paris were two of Pauline’s favorite places to shop,” says Andrew Morawski, director of the Hemingway Home & Museum. “And unfortunately, all we have is Walmart and Target nowadays.”
Visitors of the recreated home take in Spanish chandeliers. Hemingway’s bed, crowned with a headboard made from a gate at a Spanish monastery. The Spanish birthing chair that Hemingway would lug out to the fishing docks for the benefit of his back, filled with 200-some pieces of shrapnel from World War I. All told, Morawski estimates that 70 percent of the furniture is original.
The Hemingway Home
Rob O’Neal
As one continues through the property, Hemingway’s trophy mounts look on, recalling the couple’s first trip to Africa … which Morawski says was funded by (guess who!) Uncle Gus, leaving a reverberating impact on literature via works like Green Hills of Africa and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—which were indeed written in part or wholly here.
And that brings us to Hemingway’s studio. Located in a loft above the pool house (formerly a carriage house), Hemingway used to traverse over from a catwalk that Morawski says was destroyed by a hurricane in 1948. Inside, there’s an ethereal vibe—not least of which is centered around the home’s most-prized item: Hemingway’s portable Royal typewriter, an object ubiquitous to the property and the author’s many journeys around the world, cementing and supplementing his handwritten prose.
The Hemingway Home
Rob O’Neal
Of every object in the home, “No question, that is the most remarkable,” Morawski says.
In his time on the island, Hemingway finished or worked on To Have and Have Not. Death in the Afternoon. Winner Take Nothing. Half of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“He started or completed 70 percent of his life’s work in that writing studio,” Morawski says. “That’s where the magic happened for Ernest Hemingway down here in Key West, besides on the water.”
While Hemingway diligently worked in the early mornings, the staff at the Hemingway Home recently came up with a genius idea for writers during the evenings. After the museum closes for the day, a writer and one guest can book the home’s Evening Writing Experience, which gets them a guided tour, free run of the grounds, and the opportunity to work in Hemingway’s studio. Regardless of whether or not Papa’s talent finds its way into their work, the studio is a meditative space that Morawski says participants have dubbed, most often, spiritual.
[Did Hemingway say “Write drunk, edit sober?”]
Adjacent to the studio, one beautiful space Hemingway initially found the antithesis of spiritual is the pool itself. As the story goes, Pauline wanted a pool—which Hemingway thought absurd, given that the house was nearly waterfront property, with the Gulf of Mexico mere blocks away. (“He would tell Pauline, ‘You have the biggest saltwater pool right over there,’” Morawski says.)
Complicating matters, there was a reason literally no other home on Key West had a pool: In 1938, the island had no fresh running water. So, to attain the necessary water supply for the pool—all 80,784(!) gallons of it—workers had to drill down to the salt water table beneath the home to pump water back up to the pool. As the Hemingway Home further details: “Until the 1940s when Key West first had fresh water piped in and the pool was converted to a freshwater system, the pool was very high maintenance. Using the salt-water pump, it took two to three days to completely fill the pool. During the summer months, the salt water would remain fresh for only about two to three days. Then the pool would need to be completely drained, another day or two would be required to scrub down and remove the algae and debris, and then the cycle would start again.”
Morawski says with a laugh: “I’m sure you know the famous penny story.”
Indeed. As construction progressed, Hemingway returned home from Spain (where he was covering the Spanish Civil War alongside Martha Gellhorn … his future third wife). Upon seeing the pool—built at an expense of $20,000, the equivalent of around $424,000 today—the legend goes that an exasperated Hemingway declared something to the effect of, “Pauline, you’ve spent all but my last penny, so you might as well have that!” A penny embedded in the cement, pressed in by Hemingway or not, can still be seen today.
The irony of the pool saga (and you probably saw this coming): “That $20,000 pool was most likely paid for again by Uncle Gus,” Morawski says.
It seems Hemingway eventually warmed up to his man-made lagoon. In 1964, The New York Times reported that he was so fond of swimming in it nude that he had a six-foot privacy wall built around the property (though Morawski notes that, more specifically, it was built to keep out those seeking a glimpse of the notable Key West figure).
Today, Morawski says the home brings in around 800 visitors every month. And most are eager to see the phenomenon that perhaps eclipses even Hemingway in his own home: the cats. As (yet another) legend goes, a sea captain pal gifted the author with the polydactyl (read: six-toed) cat Snow White. Such cats were said to represent luck at sea, if only for the fact that their extra digit made them prime mousers on board, sparing the crew from disease. Today, the home presides over 57 delightful felines who have their own on-call vet and gobble up 60 pounds of food every week (“Chewy.com loves us,” Morawski says).
Ultimately, like so many writers of yore, fact and fiction relentlessly commingle to form our idea of Hemingway and his mythic Key West years. What is indisputable: No matter what happened in all those bars and boats, in his studio he was utterly disciplined—and literature is all the better for it.
Pauline and Hemingway would divorce in 1940, with the former staying at the home and the latter heading off to Cuba.
Despite the bleak end to the couple’s joint life in Key West, upon entering the grounds today, one is thunderstruck by the same sense of wonder that Hemingway likely first felt when he seized on the property.
As he wrote to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1931: “You’ll be crazy about this place when you see it …”
The Hemingway Home and Museum is open 9 a.m.–5 p.m. every day, and is located at: 907 Whitehead St. in Key West, Fla. For more, visit HemingwayHome.com.
Check back next month for the second installment of the Literary Tourism series featuring the Château de Monte Cristo, home of Alexandre Dumas.
Attend the Writer’s Digest University Historical Fiction Virtual Conference and learn from seven award-winning and bestselling authors.