Authors, as a class, have become a kind of tourist attraction in Key West, Fla., in tire same general category as sport fish and gay discos, sunsets and hibiscus. Ernest Hemingway, who wrote nearly half his life's work here between 1928 and 1938, was the first big draw, and he is still the dominant local legend. As a resident, Novelist David Kaufelt (Six Months with an Older Woman) is fond of explaining, "Hemingway is our first literary ghost, the big marlin in the sea. Tennessee Williams is now our second ghost, the bougainvillaea twining secretly into our hearts." Robert Frost, Hart Crane and John Dos Passes are only a few of the competing ghosts. By now live writers are so thick on the ground that the pink stucco Monroe County Public Library publishes a pamphlet: Key West: Writers in Residence (latest announced total: 55).
A year ago, the Council for Florida Libraries, the Friends of the Monroe County Library, and the Miami Herald decided to hold one of their book-and-author events in Key West. The local luminaries gladly volunteered to divulge an opinion or two. The quiet little chat over coffee cups that was planned turned into a verbal extravaganza after a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., travel agency put together a package tour. "It ended up an incredible thing," says Travel Agent Judy Twyford. "People don't want to just sit by the pool any more, they want to get together and talk. This is one of the best-moving things I've ever seen." Last month 125 people, mostly librarians, aspiring writers and voracious readers, signed up for the second annual "Key West Literary Tour & Seminar." Key West's most fully realized art form is the party, and this one lasted four days. From the Thursday-night book auction to Sunday's "Meet the Authors" coffee, it was a celebration of words.
At morning seminars in the Tennessee Williams Fine Arts Center, panelists mulled over such perennial problems as censorship and whether fiction will survive. The murmur of opinions was regularly punctuated by that strange modern cacophony, the sudden chorus of digital wristwatch alarms. From the audience, Helen McDonald (The Life and Times of Tondaleah Rosponowitz) asked, "Why are all these authors here? Is Key West the Paris of the '20s, the Tangier of the '60s?" Residents Thomas Sanchez (Rabbit Boss) and Philip Caputo (DelCorso's Gallery), who had been soberly addressing the topic "War and Peace hi the American Novel," considered the reasons. The true answers He in the words written in Key West, in the poems of Wallace Stevens, or Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, or Thomas McGuane's Ninety-Two in the Shade. Panel discussions are no place to properly explain the creative jolt writers get from living in the midst of the collective eccentricity that is Key West, or to give away the words that could describe summer nights when the air stays above 90°, preserving a mood of lunacy and transformation. As a gesture of explanation, Sanchez offered, "This is a place for very famous people to come and be left alone so they can work."