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THE HOUSE...
 The house was built in 1851
by Asa Tift, a marine architect and salvage wrecker, and
became Ernest Hemingway's home in 1931.  The house
still contains the furniture that he and his family used.
The cats about the home and grounds are descendants of the
cats he kept while he lived in the house, including many
extra-toed (polydactyls), like the one Papa
Hemingway loved. In the living room of the house there are some of
the furnishings that Papa's wife Pauline collected while
she lived in Paris and had shipped to Key West when she
and Papa bought the house. Her chandelier
collection, for example, replaced all the old ceiling
fans.  Her chest-on-chest is a 17th century Spanish,
made of Circassian walnut. When traveling, wealthy
Spaniards could take their papers and valuables with them
safely stored in its removable and lockable top.
Pauline used the chest as a writing desk. Papa
himself loved art and on the far wall of the living room
you can see a view of St. Paul's Church painted by local
artist Eugene Otto that was a part of Papa's collection.
A large lithograph shows Gregorio Fuentes; Fuentes was the
cook and mate on Papa's fishing boat Pilar for more
than 20 years, and became a good friend. In the room
across the hall from the living room the is a red leather
Cardinal's chair by the door -- it is reported to have
been used as a prop in the Broadway production of The
Fifth Column, Hemingway's only full-length play.
 THE DINING ROOM
In the dining room is Pauline's 18th century Spanish
walnut dining table. The chandelier is the
centerpiece of her collection; a hand-blown glass
chandelier from the famous island of Murano, near Venice,
Italy. The two porcelain sculptures in this room
also are from Italy. The sideboard in this room has
a strange wrought iron piece, it is a Spanish bottle safe
properly called a tantalus. It was used to
keep a  rare vintage safe from servants.
Above the bottle safe there
are photos of Hemingway. Papa was born in 1899 in
Oak Park, Illinois, and died in 1961, at the age of 61 in
Ketchum, Idaho. In those 61 years he learned to live
life to its fullest: he hunted big game in Africa, fished
for giant Marlin in the Gulf Stream, skied the Alps,
covered wars as a correspondent, won the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction, and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Hemingway was married four
times. His wives' names were Hadley, Pauline, Martha,
and Mary. The first three marriages ended in divorce
and Mary was with him when he died in Idaho. All
four wives have now passed away.
Papa had two sons, Patrick and
Gregory, by Pauline and they were raised in the Key West
house. Hemingway had another son, Jack, by his first
wife Hadley. Of his three sons, only Patrick is still
alive and he lives in Montana.
When Papa and Pauline were
divorced, he took up residence in Cuba, leaving there for
Idaho during the Cuban Revolution in 1959.
After Pauline's death in 1951, the Key West house was
rented fully furnished and upon Papa's death in 1961, his
estate sold the house to Mrs. Bernice Dickson, a local Key
West businesswoman. She lived here in the main house
until she opened it as a museum in 1964, when she moved
into the carriage house in back of the main house.
The home was designated a National Historic Landmark in
1968 and remains today the property of Mrs. Dickson's
family.
 BREAKFAST ROOM, KITCHEN, & HALLWAY
Pauline created a small breakfast room, she had workmen
split the dining room which is why the fireplace in the
dining room is tucked in a corner of the room. In
the breakfast room you can look through to the modern
kitchen that Pauline also had installed, complete with a
GE refrigerator. Originally the kitchen was in a
separate building from the main house and the present
kitchen was a back
 sitting
room. Pauline loved decorative tiles and had
Portuguese and Spanish tiles inset into the walls.
As you pass
through the hallway a Deacon's Bench is seen. It is
Spanish and a similar piece is upstairs in the master
bedroom.
MASTER
BEDROOM
 In the mater bedroom at the top of the stairs is a large
bed which is actually two twin beds that were ordered from
St. Louis, where Pauline was born. The headboard is
made in the similar style as the Deacon's Bench -- it is
actually a gate from an old Spanish monastery. The
painting over the bed was painted by Henry Faulkner and
was acquired by the museum in 1974. The artist loved
animals and had a pet goat named "Alice" that he hid in
the painting of the home. When Papa lived in the Key
West house the original Miro painting entitled "The Farm"
hung over the bed -- he purchased it from the artist in
Paris. The original is now in the National Gallery,
in Washington, D.C. Two small chairs in the bedroom
are a set: a midwife's chair and a labor chair from Spain.
Sitting on top of a Mexican chest-on chest in the room is
a replica of the famous cat sculpture, a gift to Papa from
Pablo Picasso. The cat was found in the basement and
identified by Papa's first wife Hadley, who visited the
Key West House in 1974. The original was broken by a
thief and is unfortunately beyond repair, so the replica
was created by Bob Orlin, a member of the Hemingway
Look-Alike Society. In the master bathroom room are
weight scales -- Papa fought a weight problem most of his
life. THE BOYS' ROOM
Patrick and Gregory lived in this room and today contains
memorabilia and photos from all the stages of Papa's life.
There are first editions of his books in the chests along
with boots and saddlebags from his Western trips. On
the walls, photos show Papa skiing in Schruns, Austria ,
posing with a large Marlin caught in Cuba, and Papa
pounding away on his portable typewriter. On one
wall is a photo of a very young Hemingway in his WWI Red
Cross Uniform. He was wounded in Italy and there
fell in love with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky. She
broke his heart by saying "no" to marriage, but he used
the experience 10 years later when he wrote his novel A
Farewell to Arms, the book he was working on when he
first came to Key West. A glass display in this room
contains souvenirs from Papa's childhood trips to Walloon
Lake in Northern Michigan, and a story about Papa's first
extra-toed cat, a gift from Papa's friend Stanley Dexter,
a salvage captain from Massachusetts whom Papa met at
Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West.
 NURSEMAID'S
ROOM
Another bedroom on the second floor of the home belonged
to the nanny to Patrick and Gregory. The room has
another fireplace and was also used as a sewing room when
the boys were sent off to school. The mantle piece
is Italian marble. Photos on the walls show Papa
from cradle to grave. When he lived in the house in
Key West, Papa was a man in his 30's, in the prime of his
life. The plain white cupboard in the room is
actually one of Papa's manuscripts chests where he kept
his stories on which he was working.
Originally this room was a
bathroom complete with running water when the Hemingways
purchased the house, although Pauline had the Art Deco
tile floor installed. The ceiling of the bathroom is
very low -- there is a rain cistern on the roof to provide
indoor plumbing; the house was one of the very few in town
to have had running water at the time.
THE GROUNDS, CISTERN &
WRITING STUDIO
A brick walkway runs under a Weeping Fig tree that was
probably planted when the house was
built. The bricks of the walkway were
shipped to Key West from Baltimore to pave
the City streets: Papa
bought enough in 1935 to have the wall that was built
around the property - Papa wanted his family to have
privacy from the crowds of tourists that were staring
through the chain-link fence.
 The concrete patio actually
covers the main rain cistern for drinking water. Key
West now gets water from the mainland through a pipe built
by the US Navy during the 1940s. There are many cat paw
prints in the cement of the patio, along with raccoon
tracks.
The building where Papa had his studio was originally a
carriage house, he had his studio installed on the second
floor. Today a stairway has been erected from the
patio on the ground floor for tourists to gain access to
Papa's second floor writing studio, but originally Papa
had a gate cut into the house's veranda railing and ran a
cat walk over the old cookhouse building to his studio. 
He was a morning writer and thus could get out of bed and
walk directly over to the studio. The cookhouse and
catwalk blew down in a storm in 1948.The studio remains as Papa
used it -- his Royal typewriter and Cuban cigar-maker's
chair, the mementoes he collected -- all are still in
place. In this studio he worked on Death in the
Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have
And Have Not, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and many
of his most-famous short stories, such as "The Snows of
Kilimanjaro" and "The Short, Happy Life of Francis
Macomber." THE POOL
 The
pool at the Hemingway House was the first residential
swimming pool built in Key West and at 65 feet long is
still the largest. There
used to be a diving board at the far end, which is 9 feet
deep. The pool is filled from a saltwater well in
the old smokehouse, a concrete, fern covered building near
the pool. Papa himself planned the pool, but his job
as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War
interrupted his plans and it was Pauline who supervised
construction during the winter of '37 - '38. There
must have been a few cost overruns, because when Papa saw
the finished pool upon his return to Key West From Spain
he was astounded at the final costs: $20,000.00. At
that point he took a penny out of his pocket, gave it to
Pauline, and said laughingly, "Well, you might as well
take my last cent." Papa's "last cent" can be seen
under glass even today.
 The first floor of the
carriage house was converted into an apartment by Pauline
and this is where Ernest and his fourth wife Mary stayed
when they visited the property after Pauline's death.
Their home was in Cuba but they stayed at the Key West
house quite often; the last time was in 1960. Today
this building houses the property's offices and bookstore.
URINAL
No doubt the Hemingway House in Key West houses the most
famous cat drinking fountain in the world; Papa had it
built for his pets. The top of the fountain is an
old Spanish olive jar that was brought from Cuba.
The trough at the base of the olive jar came from Papa's
good friend Joe Russell's joint "Sloppy Joe's." It
is actually one of the bar's urinals. Pauline added
the decorative tile to disguise it.
PORCH & BASEMENT
When the house was built by Asa Tift in
1851, it was made from limestone blocks cut directly from
the site of the house. As a result it has a true basement,
9 feet deep, under the house. The basement is used
today as a storage space and never gets wet. This is
because the house actually sits on a low hill, about 16
feet above sea level.
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