Summary
IT HAS BECOME SOMETHING OF A tourist trap in recent times, but strange, otherworldly things still seem to happen on Key West, and in the waters that surround it. Fishermen report seeing bolts of lightning streaking across cloudless skies, divers discover ancient treasure buried at the bottom of the ocean and, once a year, burly white-bearded men travel to the island from all over the world to see which one of them can do the best impersonation of a long-dead writer.
The furthest south of the chain of islands known as the Florida Keys, and the southernmost point on the continental United States, Key West has always been an end-of-the-line kind of place. It attracts people looking to live unconventional lives: pirates and wreckers, historically; hippies, eccentrics and drug smugglers in the last few decades.See the full content of this document
Extract
Papa and the Outlaws
It was partly this outlaw atmosphere that convinced Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, to settle on the island in 1928. Not long after they arrived, Hemingway wrote to his editor at Scribner's to say that everybody in town thought he must either be a bootlegger or a dope peddler because of a scar that he still bore from a Paris accident. He asked for some of his books to be shipped down to him so he could prove he was really a writer.
He stayed on in Key West ...See the full content of this document
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