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Key West is a compact island

But his Depression-era neighbors didn't fare as well. By 1934 the per capita income of Key West was only $7 a month. That July, municipal and county officials closed the city government and transferred its legal powers to Florida Governor David Sholtz. Sholtz put the entire island on welfare.

The job of restoring Key West's economy fell on the recently formed Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Relief administrator Julius Stone, Jr. decided Key West's natural assets - warm weather, beautiful waters, wonderful fishing and an isolated, Caribbean atmosphere - would save it. Cleaned up and repackaged, it was sold as a tourist destination.

By 1935, Stone's efforts lured visitors. Most had a tour map showing Hemingway's house as an attraction. Tourists wandered onto the writer's property, some walking right into his living room.

"Since his home has been listed as an official attraction your correspondent feels that he owes it to the FERA to give such visitors their money's worth," Hemingway wrote in "The Sights of Whitehead Street: A Key West Letter," published in the April 1935 Esquire.

In February 1936, temperamental red-headed movie actress Nancy Carroll, a 1930 Oscar nominee, visited 907 Whitehead. Word spread she was staying with Ernest and Pauline and tourists gathered outside the house. The crowd grew so large Hemingway locked the gate to keep them out, then, angry, he kicked it and broke his toe.

That July he wrote Perkins, complaining about the "bloody sons of bitching winter visitors." But one of them would have a profound effect on his life. In December 1936, writer Martha Gellhorn came to Key West with her mother for a vacation. Hemingway met her at "Sloppy Joe's" and she stayed on after her mother left town. They began an affair.

In January 1937 the North American Newspaper Alliance hired the novelist to cover the Spanish Civil War. He flew to Madrid in March to begin coverage; Gellhorn went there to be with him. Meanwhile, Key West and the "Conchs" were put on the international stage. In October 1937 To Have and Have Not was published; in it the author hurled more barbs at the "New Deal." The book's hero, Harry Morgan, comments on Key West's conversion to a tourist town: "I hear they're buying up lots, and then after the poor people are starved out and gone somewhere else to starve some more they're going to come in and make it into a beauty spot for tourists." The book and criticism landed Hemingway on the October 18 cover of Time magazine.

The writer sometimes left Gellhorn and the Spanish war zone to see his Key West family. On one trip back, he found Pauline -maybe trying to please the husband she sensed she was losing - had spent $20,000 to have a swimming pool built in the backyard. Hand dug by laborers, the island's first pool, it cost more than twice what they paid for the Whitehead Street property.

Hemingway is said to have angrily thrown down a penny at Pauline's feet, saying she might as well take his last cent. Unruffled, Pauline preserved the moment, pressing the penny into wet cement and covering it with a piece of glass. Today, still there, the pool-side penny is a visitor favorite.

Gregory Hemingway wrote about playing "wonderful war games with papa" on the lawn after his father came back from Spain in May 1937. The "old man" brought firecrackers "so we had imaginary armies moving into battle against each other, complete with cannon fire and puffs of smoke." But his parents' marriage was dissolving. He recalled hearing "shouting in other rooms, doors slamming, Mother scurrying out of their bedroom crying."

On another trip home from Spain, the writer discussed his work with the Key West Citizen. In a February 1, 1938, Citizen story, he said he regretted some residents were upset over his portrayal of their city in To Have and Have Not. "No one has more admiration for the town, and appreciation of its people, their friendliness, the fine life and wonderful fishing here than I have," he said. But his Key West connection was evaporating.

When not in Spain, he spent much of his time in Cuba. After a futile, half-hearted attempt to save his marriage to Pauline, the writer gave up and moved to Cuba with Gellhorn in December 1939. On November 5, 1940, the Key West Citizen reported Ernest and Pauline Hemingway had divorced; "Papa," charged with desertion, didn't contest the suit, the paper said.

Eighteen days later, the Citizen reported Hemingway's marriage to Martha Gellhorn. The couple moved into a renovated estate near Havana, but the union would last less than five years. In 1946 Hemingway married journalist Mary Welsh.

The writer remained in Cuba with his fourth wife but made occasional visits to Key West. Second wife Pauline stayed on in the house at 907 Whitehead until her death in 1951. In June 1953, shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Hemingway told Citizen reporter Susan McAvoy he still loved the city. Walking with her, he pointed to the building at 314 Simonton Street where he and Pauline stayed 25 years earlier. "That's where we lived when we first came to Key West," he told McAvoy. "Of course, it was different then. But these are the same wonderful old houses - these are what I love."

Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1954. Earlier that same year, in Africa he was injured in two airplane crashes in two days. His blood pressure was dangerously high, his vision going bad; he became diabetic. Soon he took shock treatment for depression. On July 2, 1961, he killed himself with a shotgun at his Ketchum, Idaho, home.

After Hemingway's heirs sold the Key West house to Jack and Bernice Daniel in 1961, the couple stayed there a short time. Then in February 1964 the house became the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum.