Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, IL in 1899 and served as a volunteer in the Red Cross Ambulance Corps during World War I, when he was severely wounded. After the war he settled in Paris as a reporter for the Toronto Star, and in 1926 he published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which won international acclaim. Returning from Europe in April 1928 by way of Havana, he arrived in Key West on the Peninsular & Occidental Steamship Company and, delayed when a new Ford was not ready, spent time in the city, liked its atmosphere and excellent fishing, returned, and soon made it his permanent residence. In Key West he finished A Farewell to Arms, based on his wartime experiences in Italy and his love of nurse Agnes von Kurowsky, and then wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Green Hills of Africa, Death in the Afternoon, and To Have and Have Not, his autobiographic novel about Key West. In 1931 he bought the house at 507 Whitehead Street, built in 1831 by Asa Tift, owned it until his death, and left Key West for Cuba in 1939. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, and his presence on the island and the literary and famous friends he drew there helped make Key West widely known and widely visited.

Key West, Florida · United States