Ernest Hemingway spent the 1930s in Key West, Florida, and more than six decades after his death, fans, scholars, and relatives continue to congregate on the island city to celebrate the author's novels and adventurous life. Hemingway Days started in 1981 with a short-story competition and a look-alike contest. This year's celebration concludes Sunday on the 125th anniversary of Hemingway's birth on July 21, 1899, per the AP.
The difference between the public perception and the documented reality of Hemingway can be fuzzy. He loved big-game fishing in the Caribbean and hunting in Africa. He loved bullfighting, baseball, boxing, and barhopping. But he also was a serious artist who won Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. He put so much of his life experiences into his writing that it can be tricky to separate the man from the myth. Great-grandson Stephen Hemingway Adams Adams says he's fine with some people loving the adventurer more than the writer. "I think it's a split, and I think that's what's fun," Adams says of the throngs of look-alikes who visit Key West every year.
The Key West that Hemingway first visited in 1928 was a rustic fishing village, not a bustling tourist destination. Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, had only planned a brief stop to pick up a car during their move from Paris to Arkansas, where Pauline's family lived. But the car wasn't ready and they had to wait several weeks. Hemingway quickly made friends with local business owners and fishermen. The couple made frequent visits to the island and eventually bought a French Colonial home on a 1.5-acre lot in 1931. "He doesn't come here to act like a recluse and just write," said Cori Convertito, a curator at Key West Museum of Art & History at the Custom House. "He's out at the bars all the time. He's out fishing with people. He's interacting in boxing matches."
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Much of Hemingway's time in Key West was devoted to big-game fishing with friends. Convertito said Hemingway began to pioneer new techniques after getting his own boat, the Pilar, in 1934. "He was desperate to land a fully intact marlin," Convertito said. The slow process of reeling in a trophy fish left them vulnerable to sharks, similar to the giant marlin caught in Hemingway's 1952 novel, The Old Man and the Sea.
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