Tennessee Williams House / 1431 Duncan Street
Tennessee Williams first came to Key West in l941, because
I liked to swim and because Key West was the southernmost
point in America. He was thirty years old, and the masterpieces
A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, Suddenly
Last Summer, and Camino Real were just around the corner.
He
once wrote: It (Key West) was a mecca for painters and
writers in 1941. I met the poet Elizabeth Bishop and
artist Grant Wood there that winter... There was a
genteel boarding
house called The Trade Winds. It was operated by a grand
dame from Georgia... She suddenly remembered that she
had a little shack in the back of the house that could
be converted
into living quarters for me... The rent was seven dollars
a week.
In 1949 Tennessee Williams bought a story and a half,
white clapboard, red-shuttered Bahamian cottage which
he moved to the town’s outskirts. Here he fashioned
a compound, which included a spare one-room writing studio
he called Mad House, and a guest cottage with a swimming
pool. (A mosaic rose tattoo was tiled on the pool’s
floor!).
Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, John Hersey, Ralph Ellison
/ Windsor Lane Compound, Windsor Lane Just past Solares
Hill, the island’s highest peak l6 feet above sea
level to the left, and hidden behind the white stucco
wall, is a collection of once run-down shacks and shanties,
frame cottages perched upon limestone piers, later restored
as the winter residences of such literary luminaries
as poet Richard Wilbur, critic John Ciardi, writer Ralph
Ellison and Hiroshima author John Hersey. There are several
literati compounds in Old Town,and this complex, established
in 1976, with its landscaped walkways and a central pool,
is one of the most charming. Wilbur won the Pulitzer
Prize for poetry and is renowned for his translations
of Moliere; Ciardi, a critic, also translated Dante’s
Divine Comedy; Ralph Ellison wrote The Invisible Man;
and John Hersey, taught at Yale for 18 years and won
the Pulitzer Prize for his writing debut, A Bell for
Adano.
Elizabeth Bishop Houses / 624 White (and others)
On her first visit to Key West, Elizabeth Bishop rented
an apartment from Mrs. Pinder, a friendly landlady,
at 529 Whitehead Street. For Elizabeth Bishop, however,
one of America’s most highly acclaimed contemporary
poets, home from 1938 to 1946 became a weathered nineteenth
century clapboard Eyebrow house at 624 White Street.
In 1941, to save money, Bishop rented her White Street
place to Navy personnel and roomed with Marjori Carr
Stevens at 623 Margaret Street. Living in out of the
way places appealed to her, as she wrote in The End
of March: I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house
my crypto-dream house that crooked box set up on pilings,
shingled green, a sort of an artichoke of a house,
but greener... . (Many things about this place are
dubious).
While in Key West, the poet would plant her gardens,
swim, fish, write, paint and bicycle. Later, in December
1948, Elizabeth Bishop found an apartment at 611 Frances
Street: large with a screened porch up in a tree, and
a view of endless waves of tin roofs and palm trees.
Bishop’s life included stays in Mexico, Europe,
North Africa, Key West and Brazil. She was awarded the
1955 Pulitzer Prize for North and South A Cold Spring,
a National Book Award for Questions of Travel (1967)
and The Complete Poems (1970).
Shel Silverstein Home / 600 block
William Two dwellings, side by side on William Street,
were beautifully restored by gifted author-cartoonist-songwriter
Shel Silverstein. He resided with practiced anonymity
in Key West and Sausalito. Behind sheltering banyan
roots stand a Greek Revival house and Shel’s
studio next door. Author of a litany of books, Silverstein’s
blockbuster A Light in the Attic perched at the top
of the Best Seller list for over three years.
James L. Herlihy House / 709 Baker’s Lane
Best known for his 1964 novel Midnight Cowboy, the film
version of which made Dustin Hoffman a star, Herlihy
called Key West home for two decades. Two of his earlier
works, the play Blue Denim and the novel All Fall Down,
became movies. He and agent Dick Duane introduced Tallulah
Bankhead to the island. Clad in flowery pedalpushers,
she could sometimes be seen at Fausto’s Food
Palace. Herlihy wrote of Key West: You see people on
the streets all night long. Sailors alone and in twos
and threes. Latin dandies in pleated shirts, black-haired
women at their elbows, drunken shrimpers... . And for
every person you see, you will feel as sharply the
presence of several invisible souls. For the town is
plainly haunted. Lazy ghosts of old inhabitants rock
forever on all the empty porches, and others watch
over the street from shutters at second story windows.
If you do not believe in ghosts, the town will make
you nervous.... Herlihy lived here on Baker’s
Lane until he left Key West in the late l970’s,
saying that Key West was becoming too technicolor.
He died in 1993.
James Kirkwood House / Conch Grove compound / Catherine
and Grinnell
The son of silent screen star Lila Lee, Kirkwood is
best remembered as the co-author of the record-setting
l976
Broadway musical, A Chorus Line. His novels included
P.S. Your Cat is Dead, Good Times, Bad Times and Some
Kind of Hero. Kirkwood was one of the original home
owners in this first compound.
Key West’s circle of literati also includes Harry
S Truman, Joseph Lash, Wallace Stevens, John Dewey, Robert
Frost, Alison Lurie, Annie Dillard, Jimmy Buffett, Ann
Beattie, and Robert Stone. |
