2 Books to Bring Key West to Life

Dear readers,

“An endless party sounds fun in theory,” writes Kristy McGinnis’s narrator in the novel “Motion of Intervals,” but “the body and mind can only take so much. Some people show up here hoping it’s the answer to all of their problems and figure out too late that they actually brought the problems with them.”

What could she be describing but Key West? Dissipated, legend-fogged, magical, menacing, inspiring, dispiriting, disporting, precarious, reckless, crummy, stunning, scored by the caws of jungle-fowl and the chords of acoustic guitar covers, gallantly drunk in the face of hurricane-driven annihilation, the Conch Republic (capital: Margaritaville) is an eternal muse.

—Sadie

“One Art: Letters,” by Elizabeth Bishop

Nonfiction, 1994

“I like Key West more and more,” Bishop wrote to a friend upon arriving on the southernmost point of the archipelago at the age of 25. Bishop hoped, she said, that the island “will be my permanent home someday.” In 1936, Key West was a geographical and social world away from the Northeast that Bishop had known most of her life. The colors thrilled her, the weather agreed with her asthma and she was able to live in open domestic harmony with her partner at the time, Louise Crane. Both young women were well-to-do, but their trusts went a lot farther in a place where the main means of subsistence were still fishing and cigar-making: The house they bought on White Street — “perfectly beautiful to me, inside and out,” she wrote to Marianne Moore in 1938 — cost them $2,000.

Bishop wrote much of “North & South” while living on Key West, in what turned out to be an early chapter rather than a permanent home. I first visited the island (and the house at 624 White Street) partly because I wanted to see what had inspired her poems “The Fish” and “Roosters” and “Florida.” But mostly because I wanted to experience the place that had proved such an oasis in her tumultuous, often painful life, as I knew from this book of her collected letters. Bishop was one of the great correspondents, and the entire corpus of her letters makes for one of the rawest, most gripping portraits I know. The Key West letters come early, and they are filled with hope and beauty. When, later, she wrote the villanelle “One Art,” that was about Key West, too.

Read if you like: Bishop’s poetry, Jean Rhys, Nancy Milford’s “Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.”

Available from: The book, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is in print and widely available — I got mine at the Seminary Co-op in Chicago.

“Home at the End of the World,” by Rita B. Troxel

Nonfiction, 2020

I debated whether to include this gem, for a couple of reasons: It’s somewhat hard to find and, what’s worse, I seem to have left my own copy on Key West, necessitating the Photoshopped image above. But the book is such a perfect representation of the place — somehow, even its elusiveness feels apropos, as does the fact that mine is very likely somewhere in the sands of Fort Zachary Taylor Beach — that I overruled my doubts.

Troxel’s collection of reminiscences from the golden age of Conch Republic mayhem — the 1960s, and especially the 1970s and ’80s — is as varied and fabulous and wild and alarming and funny as one might hope for from a place where the population of resident writers has included James Merrill and Tennessee Williams and Armistead Maupin and Ann Beattie, to name a few. In what amounts to an oral biography of sorts, the island is by turns riotous and piratical, host to more characters than you’ll find in a caper by Carl Hiassen (who has himself spent serious time here, obviously).

Of course, you’ll get your Jim Harrison and Hunter S. Thompson cameos, a full complement of parrot-heads, lots of swinger vibes, more drunken antics than you or your liver can tolerate in one sitting and plenty of extralegal shenanigans, including by elected officials. But “Home at the End of the World” also depicts a home at the end of an era, before Key West was domesticated (to a degree) by the real alarm bells of climate change, the ravages of AIDS and, frankly, the franchising of Margaritaville.

Read if you like: Local history, salt-rimmed drinks, Greenwich Village’s bohemian 1920s.

Available from: If you’re in the area you can find it, as I did, in the extensive local section of Books & Books, the store that Judy Blume co-owns at the Studios of Key West. Otherwise, rest assured that the store ships!

Why don’t you …

Take it from a local? Ann Beattie’s guide to Key West remains the best.
Have and have not? I regret to inform you that the live webcam of Hemingway’s six-toed cats is not operational as of this writing. But you can still get an excellent tour of the gorgeous Key West house (and its frankly inspiring bathroom decor, probably courtesy of Hem’s second wife, Pauline) where Papa wrote some of his most famous works.
Sing beyond the genius of the sea? Here is Wallace Stevens reciting “Idea of Order at Key West.”

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