Ernest Hemingway moved to Key West, Florida, in 1928 with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. The couple’s arrival began a major chapter in Hemingway’s life and connected him permanently with the island’s literary history.
Pauline purchased the house at 907 Whitehead Street, a property built in 1848 by marine architect and wrecking magnate Asa Tift. Hemingway used the home’s carriage house as a writing studio, taking advantage of the privacy. The house later became known as the Hemingway Home and Museum and remains one of Key West’s best-known literary landmarks.
Hemingway’s Key West years are often associated with fishing, boating, and the bar Sloppy Joe’s, but the island was also a productive workplace. He wrote or developed several important works there, including To Have and Have Not and parts of Green Hills of Africa. The move is sometimes confused with his later years in Cuba, where he lived at Finca Vigía and spent much of the 1940s and 1950s.