The bell has tolled for Key West’s Hemingway Days festival, a celebration of the writer’s life held each July in the Florida Keys, where he lived and wrote for a decade.
The festivities had become so commercialized that they were no longer a suitable tribute, said Patrick Hemingway, one of Ernest Hemingway’s sons. Rather than slug it out in court, Key West organizers said they would cancel the fest.
That means no Hemingway look-alike contest, no tour of Hemingway’s favorite haunts such as Sloppy Joe’s Bar on Duvall Street and Captain Tony’s Saloon round the corner, and no short-story competition for aspiring writers.
The festival, held since 1981, would draw about 10,000 people to Key West, many of them sporting white beards and hefty paunches and bidding to outdo each other in bravado and boozing.
“We think it is very lacking in taste. We think it is a travesty on the memory of Ernest Hemingway,” his son said by phone from his home in Bozeman, Mont. The family is planning an event to mark the centennial of the writer’s birth in 1999, his son said.
