By Steve Winston
Writers have always been drawn to Florida, perhaps because it’s the last frontier, the point where the U.S. melts, somewhat chaotically, into a mélange of exotic cultures across the Florida Straits.
They’re drawn by multi-ethnic cities and Old South rural villages, and by the melding of sun, sky, and water everywhere you look. They’re drawn here by colors – unbelievable blues and greens and purples and oranges, splashed all over flat horizons that never seem to be reached.
They’re drawn by a thousand shades of light, striking or diffused, in alleyways, on buildings, and shimmering over waterways. And they’re drawn here, as well, by the air – heavy and hard and full of ominous promise one season, cool and soothing the next.
In choosing Florida, they have endowed the state with a wonderful literary legacy: numerous Pulitzer Prizes, Nobel Prizes and National Book Awards to date. Not to mention historic residences, intriguing museums and, of course, the books themselves.
Key West
Ernest Hemingway
The most famous of them all lived at 907 Whitehead Street. Ernest Hemingway bought the beige and green-trimmed Spanish-Colonial home for $8,000 in 1931, and lived here until 1940.
Here, he wrote spending the cool morning hours writing, Hemingway would wander Key West streets by the afternoon, listening to tall tales told by the island’s mariners, wreckers and drifters. Death In the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
The interior of the house is testament to a legendary life, with hunting trophies from Africa, photos of fishing and hunting trips, porcelain statues from Spain and Africa, ceremonial masks and artifacts from Zanzibar to Cuba, and the dark wooden Spanish desks and chests that he and his wife Pauline (one of four Hemingway wives) favored. You can almost feel Hemingway’s presence in his study, though the old Royal typewriter he used sits silent now on a table.
Walk around the lush grounds and you can’t help but run into the descendants of the six-toed cats Hemingway kept. Walk around back to the pool area and look for a penny imbedded in the concrete. As the story goes, the writer returned from overseas to find that his wife had spent $20,000 to build the saltwater pool, at the time the only swimming pool between Havana and Miami. In a fit of anger, Hemingway took a penny from his pocket and threw it down into the still-wet cement, yelling, “Here, why don’t you take my last penny!”
Hemingway House
Ernest “Papa” Hemingway genuinely loved Key West. He loved the fishing. And he loved the fact that the locals treated him as just a regular guy, who could visit his favorite watering hole (Sloppy Joe’s, still on nearby Duval Street) without fanfare.
But Hemingway was hardly the only literary luminary to love Key West. Plenty of other great writers have lived and worked in Key West, ranging from Hart Crane (who ended it all by jumping off his boat between Key West and Cuba) to Philip Caputo.
America’s most famous playwright, Tennessee Williams, caught the Key West bug. Author of A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, Williams bought the house at 1431 Duncan Street for $27,000 in 1949. The house was reportedly purchased a few years back by a Pennsylvania couple for $1.2 million.
According to his brother, Dakin Williams, the author fell in love with this cypress house on one of his trips to Cuba. So he had it floated over – that’s right, floated over – on a raft.
Tennessee Williams died in New York on February 25,1983, leaving everything, including his Key West house, to a mysterious woman friend of rather unsavory reputation. The home has had several owners since that time and remains a private residence.
Cross Creek
Rawlings’ library at Cross Creek
About five hundred miles north of Key West, near Gainesville, is the rural hamlet of Cross Creek, former home to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, best-known for her American classic The Yearling.
Rawlings fell in love with rural north Florida after she and her first husband, Charles Rawlings, came down from New York to visit his brother.
“It spoke to me,” she said. So in 1928, she and Charles sold all their worldly goods and moved to what some considered a mosquito-infested crossroads, named after the little creek that ran through it. They paid $12,000 for 72 acres and the white clapboard, cracker-style house.
Charles hated it, and moved back to New York after five years. But the solitude and Old South rhythms of the place appealed to Marjorie, and she decided to make her life here. She loved it so much that she lived here for eight years without electricity or plumbing.
Scattered throughout the house and grounds are the memories of a life well-lived…the old porch with the white roof and the creaky door, where she created magic on an old “Silent” typewriter…brooms that she made of straw from her barn, hanging on the wall in a wooden breezeway … her four-poster bed with a tea tray and her nightgown still on it … the liquor cabinet which some folks said she stocked with moonshine purchased down the road in Ocala. And something she wrote on a wooden sign as you enter the grounds, “After long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home.”
Eatonville
Zora Neal Hurston
Just six miles north of Orlando is the tiny town of Eatonville, site of America’s first incorporated African-American community. It was home to Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), whose novels and short stories brought the experiences of her townspeople alive for the world outside. Fantasy, mysticism, and stifled longings for faraway places fill Hurston’s stories, which are set amidst the swamps, dirt roads, rivers and brooks, owls and alligators of central Florida.
Although her childhood home is long gone, Eatonville is filled with reminders of its favorite daughter. The town’s Heritage Trail has several stops devoted to the writer, one of them a small museum in which she is prominently featured. And every winter, Eatonville stages its annual Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities.
Florida Writers: Their Piece of Paradise
Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the great writers of the 18th century, spent some time in St. Augustine in 1827 while rehabilitating from “the consumption.”
Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, legendary environmentalist, lived most of her 100-plus years in Miami. Her Everglades: River of Grass, published in 1947, forever changed the way Floridians perceived the natural wonder in their midst. Another noted local writer – who still lives here – is Dr. Ferdie Pacheco, who first gained fame for his books on Muhammad Ali but who has also written some wonderful books on Tampa’s Ybor City, his boyhood home.
John D.MacDonald ’s unglamorous literary detective, Travis McGee, generated a worldwide cult that still thrives today. MacDonald lived in Florida from 1949 until his death in 1986,the last part of his life in a house on Siesta Key. His disheveled detective lived in a houseboat at Slip #F18 in Fort Lauderdale’s Bahia Mar Marina.
Venice was the home to Walter Farley, who wrote the “Black Stallion” books, adored by children all over the world. A display at the Venice Public Library on Nokomis Avenue highlights his achievements.
Jack Kerouac, whose writings gave rise to the fifties “Beat” generation, lived the last few years of his life in St.Petersburg.
In the late 1890s, Tampa was the home to Jose Martí, known more as a great patriot than a writer. But Marti, who stirred folks with his fiery speeches for Cuban independence, was a good enough poet to pioneer the movement that became known as Modernism.
Jacksonville was the lifelong home of James Weldon Johnson, the noted African-American poet and songwriter. His 1900 poem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” considered by many to be the black national anthem, is a testament to the African-American community’s will to prevail.
Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War classic, The Red Badge of Courage, lived in Jacksonville for part of his life. While there, Crane survived the sinking of a passenger boat, The Commodore, and wrote a famous article about it for The New York Press. At age 27, he married a Jacksonville businesswoman – whose business cannot really be discussed in the pages of a family-friendly book.
Cross Creek
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park
352-466-3672
www.dep.state.fl.us/parks
Eatonville
The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community
407-647-3307
Key West
Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum
305-294-1136
www.HemingwayHome.com