Hemingway's House and the Cats Who Inherited It

The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum at 907 Whitehead Street is Key West's most visited attraction, and it deserves the traffic — not because Hemingway's writing needs a museum (the books do their own work) but because the house itself, and the fifty-some polydactyl cats who run it, tell a story about Key West that the man himself would have appreciated: beautiful, slightly unruly, and stubbornly resistant to anyone else's idea of how things should be done.

The house is a two-story Spanish Colonial built in 1851 from native coral rock, and Hemingway lived here from 1931 to 1939 — the years he wrote To Have and Have Not, Green Hills of Africa, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. His second-floor writing studio sits above the carriage house, accessible by a catwalk from the main house, and the room is preserved with his typewriter, his bookshelves, and the particular mess of a man who wrote standing up and kept a mounted gazelle head on the wall because he felt like it.

The cats are the real draw, and the staff knows it. They are descendants (allegedly) of a six-toed cat given to Hemingway by a ship captain, and they roam the property with a proprietary grace that suggests they know their paws have more toes than yours and consider this a point of pride. They sleep on the beds, lounge on the writing desk, and pose for photographs with the practiced ease of creatures who have been doing this for generations.

What visitors miss: The pool. Hemingway installed it in 1938 at a cost of $20,000 — four times the price of the house itself — and when he saw the bill, he pressed a penny into the wet cement of the patio and told his wife she might as well have his last cent. The penny is still there, embedded in the concrete beside the pool, and it's the most Hemingway detail in the entire house: dramatic, generous, a little bit petty, and absolutely permanent.