The Hemingway House and the sixty-something-toed cats

Ernest Hemingway lived at 907 Whitehead Street from 1931 to 1939. Nine years — the longest single stretch he spent in any one house in his adult life. He wrote 'To Have and Have Not,' 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' (drafted), 'Death in the Afternoon,' and 'The Green Hills of Africa' either at that house or during the marlin-fishing trips he took out of the island's harbor. It was the most productive decade of his career.

The house was built in 1851 by a Connecticut shipping magnate named Asa Tift out of coral rock quarried from the property itself. When Hemingway and his second wife Pauline bought it in 1931, it was falling down. They restored it, installed the first in-ground swimming pool in Key West (Hemingway complained about the $20,000 cost for the rest of his life — a plaque marks a penny embedded in the concrete where he 'threw his last cent'), and turned the second-floor carriage house into his writing studio.

The studio is preserved. The typewriter he used sits on a small round table. He wrote standing up, about 500 words per day, from 6 a.m. to noon, then went fishing. The output tells you the schedule worked.

The cats are the other thing. Somewhere in the mid-1930s, a ship's captain gave Hemingway a white six-toed tomcat named Snow White. Polydactyl cats — cats with extra toes on their front paws — are a genetic quirk more common on ships because sailors considered them lucky. Snow White fathered generations. Today, the house has between 40 and 55 cats on the property at any given time, roughly half of them still polydactyl, all descended from Snow White. Every cat is named after a famous person. Some are the sixth or seventh generation from the original tom.

The staff care for the cats around the clock. They have a full-time veterinarian on retainer, a cemetery in the back garden with headstones for the ones that have passed (Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra, and Charlie Chaplin all have graves), and they get their own hurricane evacuation plan. The house is a designated federally-recognized preserve of the cat colony under a 2012 USDA settlement.

The visit takes about 45 minutes. Go early — the house opens at 9 a.m. and by 11 there's a line. Tour guides are actual literary historians, not scripted actors. Most of them will tell you the biographical mess: the affair Hemingway had with the woman who became his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, while Pauline was in the house; the split; the departure for Cuba in 1939 without Pauline; the return during the Cuban Revolution; the suicide in Idaho in 1961. It's a warts-and-all tour and it's better for it.

Down the street: Sloppy Joe's on Duval, where Hemingway drank. The original Sloppy Joe's — the one Hemingway actually drank in — was at 428 Greene Street, not the current Duval location. The bar moved in 1937 over a rent dispute (the landlord raised it $1 a week) and Hemingway helped carry the barstools down the street to the new location. The Greene Street building is now Captain Tony's Saloon. Both bars exist, both claim him, both are worth a walk-through if you're doing the literary route through the island.