Recommended Reading

  • Ernest Hemingway is arguably one of KW’s most famous writers, and during his time here wrote A Farewell To Arms, Death In The Afternoon, Winner Take Nothing, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, The Fifth Column and the First Forty-nine Stories, and For Whom the Bell Tolls. 
  • Judy Blume, your favorite author from middle school era, runs a book shop named Books & Books @ The Studio of Key West downtown and will occasionally be seen working. 
  • Last Train to Paradise
    • Fast-paced and gripping true account of the extraordinary construction and spectacular demise of the Key West Railroad—one of the greatest engineering feats ever undertaken, destroyed in one fell swoop by the strongest storm ever to hit U.S. shores. Required reading for anyone driving the Overseas Highway to/from mainland Florida or generally interested in Keys history. 
  • Mile Marker Zero 
    • For Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there was Paris in the twenties. For others, later, there was Greenwich Village, Big Sur, and Woodstock. But for an even later generation—one defined by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson—there was another moveable feast: Key West, Florida. The small town on the two-by-four-mile island has long been an artistic haven, a wild refuge for people of all persuasions, and the inspirational home for a league of great American writers. Mile Marker Zero tells the story of how these writers and artists found their identities in Key West and maintained their friendships over the decades, despite oceans of booze and boatloads of pot, through serial marriages and sexual escapades, in that dangerous paradise.
  • Last Train to Key West
    • A light and fun adventure romance novel set in Key West 1935 as the great hurricane bears down on the island. Hey–it’s vacation and not everything needs to be a Pulitzer Prize winner!
  • 92 in the Shade by Thomas McGuane
    • Set in Key West (and written by an author who spent many years living in Key West), it’s a fictional portrayal of a new flats fishing guide trying to break into the tight-knit Keys fishing scene
  • Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen
    • A comical murder-mystery set in the lower Keys. Also being made into a TV show that was filmed in town (starring Vince Vaughn)!