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Synopsis cont'd...
unravels their ominous and conflicting goals, the results of which add to the growing body count. As the investigation unfolds and the hurricane approaches, tensions escalate among the town’s divided Cubans and the setting is right for a civil upheaval.
Extensive research adds rich detail to this intriguing tale of greed and unconscionable inhumanity.
Author’s note:
People have asked me how I came to write this book. How does the muse to write anything come to us? For years, I owned a home in Big Pine Key, about thirty miles north of Key West. I had always been a fan, though often a reluctant one, of Ernest Hemingway’s, since my college days. I say reluctant because as much as I liked the simplicity of his work (and I believe that is why he is so popular worldwide because his simple story telling is easy to translate and its messages universal) I had a hard time with the complications of his personal life, much of which he brought upon himself. Indeed, the fact that so many of us know anything about his real life is unusual compared to his contemporaries. Other than Fitzgerald, who became iconic though no where near the level of Hemingway, most of us know little about the personal lives of Steinbeck, or Faulkner, or Wolfe, comparatively.
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Hemingway seemed like a man whom had everything but was never quite satisfied. I have had discussions with other learned followers of Hemingway about the myths surrounding the writer and it is my opinion that he perpetuated those myths as much as anyone. If he did not want people thinking of him as the great angler, the great white hunter, the great drinker, then why did he allow media coverage that depicted him as such? He even did ads that exploited his pastimes. Why did he box with fighters in front of his house, rather than in a gym where few people would see the bouts?
It is fact that Hemingway enjoyed his fishing, often going to Cuba, as well as Bimini, and the Dry Tortugas for days. It is fact, he enjoyed his happy hours at the bars, mostly at Sloppy Joe’s, whose owner was a friend of his. It is a fact that his marriage to Pauline was troubled and that Martha Gellhorn became his mistress years before he divorced Pauline. After that, I took what was going on in the rest of the world, along with some literary license, and attempted to integrate it with what might have happened in Hemingway’s life at that time.
It is fact that, in 1938-39 refugees were escaping Nazi persecution by the thousands and many of those who were denied access to the U.S. found sanctuary in Cuba, though the unfortunate passengers of the ill-fated St. Louis could find no refuge, anywhere.
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