Finding Florida: Ernest Hemingway

E. Stone Meredith, Ph.D.

Founder, Clever Chicas Project

Adjunct Instructor, CSU-Global, Troy University, National University, Trident University

Volunteer, The Hippodrome Theatre and We The People Theatre

Creative Director, Florida Hemingway Society

Member, Florida College English Association

Founding Member, Rocky Mountain College English Association

In early Summer, 2002, Stone Meredith began studying Ernest Hemingway in the context of his life and times in Florida during the 1930s. That journey led her to Florida College English Association, where she continues to enjoy and share collaborative growth with the state's Scholar/Practitioners who teach in Florida's diverse higher education system.

Below is one of her earliest artifacts on the topic, a brief documentary featuring Florida teachers who have worked for decades to teach critical literacy through the tools and tropes of various Florida writers.

Also included are the questions she answered as she began her journey with The Florida Hemingway Society in 2018. Since this point, her work has continued with various groups, including Gainesville's Hippodrome Theatre, where she aids in developing high school curriculum to explore Ernest Hemingway's Esquire essay "The Sights of Whitehead Street," a satiric story imagining life for the author when he was listed as #18 on the Key West tourist map of his day.

A little farther down the page, you'll find her original 500-word essay used to model, for students, perspectives learned from Hemingway's 1935 Esquire essay that express her own experiences on America's southernmost key., The goal is to show students that living in paradise has an impact on the individual, an impact that makes every voice a valid and special slice of Florida folklore.

Questions and Correspondence

In my work with various students who study literature, I find it important to share why these authors matter to me.

Below is an example of my own personal ‘interview’ that I share with students before starting a study of Ernest Hemingway.  As a writer and enduring cultural figure, Hemingway finds his way into my curriculum in Literature Survey courses and in the various collaborations generated for my 20-plus year project, Finding Florida, a project that continues through collaborations with The Clever Chicas Project and The Hippodrome Theatre in Gainesville, Florida. 

By showing students that these writers stay with us throughout our lives, we can begin to show these students the power and merit of reading and re-reading favorite authors over time—to learn about our worlds and ourselves as we evolve over time. Such entry can also spark conversations about how scholarship on a writer evolves with trends and cultural standards over time. Perhaps no writer embodies this power to morph with cultural needs than Ernest Hemingway, as my experience with him in various disciplines works to illustrate.

What are your first memories of Ernest Hemingway? 

My grandfather ran a gas station in a small town in Western North Carolina, and I spent much of my grade school years there, as it was right next to the public library, and I loved to read.  My grandmother’s bridge and poker friends would often stop by the gas station to hang out and talk.  One of those friends was man named Angel.  He had immigrated from Cuba and was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway.  

At the time, I did not understand that he had been forced to leave his homeland.  I did not understand why Hemingway was such an important figure to the Cuban people. I just knew that Angel had a Datsun Z car and that he was always right about the authors he thought I’d like.

After checking out several Hemingway works and reading them on the edge of my seat in the summer between fourth and fifth grade, I added him to my list of favorites. He joined F Scott Fitzgerald and my first love, Thomas Wolfe, a native of nearby Asheville, North Carolina.  Those three men convinced me that I needed to move beyond the Blue Ridge of my home to see and discover the worlds they created.

What was the first Hemingway book or writing that you remember reading?

I still remember sitting on the red stool behind the cash register at Mitchell’s Exxon and reading the opening of his novels and going over and over them again. Always, the opening lines took you to a place—a place far away and yet a place anyone might imagine.  Either you were hungry or thirsty or alone or broken, and from there, the details would be filled in with a concise, journalistic style that made me trust him in ways I had never trusted Fitzgerald or Wolfe.  I went to those two writers to exorcise feelings. I went to Hemingway to unwind and understand feelings.  Don’t I sound like a fun child? But in all seriousness, I knew he was separate, even different, from the other writers I somehow imagined to be great writers, and he was always the one I went to when I wanted to really ponder choices in life.  Should I do a or b? How should I comport myself in situation c or d? It seems funny now, as a little girl with glasses and a bookish nature, that Hemingway was my early divining rod, a sort of moral compass, but he was, and he never steered me wrong as I read and re-read his words atop that worn, red stool.

How did this author become such an important part of your life?

It is as if he just appears at all of the big shifts in my life.  When I went to UNC-Chapel Hill with the dream of becoming a television producer and ending apartheid (Mandela was released before I could arrive in South Africa and join the cause), Ernest Hemingway was the writer who stood out to me in an early survey class.  I was drawn to his war coverage.  He shared that same style of taking me there—making me feel the thirst or the wind or the limited vision.  I loved his journalism and saw in him the potential for covering the news ethically and influencing a culture by bringing the reality of distant conflicts to the American dinner table through his journalism.

What, to you, is the biggest misunderstanding about Ernest Hemingway?

When I discovered him as a child, I didn’t really understand gender roles.  My grandmother told me I could do whatever I wanted, and then, I still believed her, so I read him as his equal—someone who could have been him or any of his characters.  I’m grateful for that sheltered foundation.

By college, of course I had seen the reality of gender roles.  I was forced to wear panty hose, for example, at more than one job, while men could wear pants and whatever shirt they put on. Things were changing in my moment—the mid-to-late 1980s, and that change is still, thankfully, happening.  But meanwhile, back in reality, the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing women equal protection and rights under the law still never passed, and men and women, by definition, are different.

Hemingway, a big guy good at guy stuff, has really taken a beating in my lifetime as a male figure. When a pendulum starts to swing, the swing is severe and forceful. A lot of critics and scholars pointed to his writings as misogynistic and cruel to women.  I missed most of that nonsense, never a fan myself of binary attacks and opinion swings. 

But when I returned to graduate school in the late 90s, the shifting sands of graduate school took my research from the Early American work of my Master’s program to a focus on Modernism.  Dr. Phil Sipiora was on the faculty at my PhD program, and he had done a lot of work on Hemingway.  When he heard I was no longer driven by a focus on Early American literature, he suggested that I take a class on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, a class he was noted for teaching.  I followed his advice and was shocked to read all the negative scholarly writing on Ernest Hemingway.  So many people said he was unkind to women in his fiction. They also, in my opinion, took New Historicism a bit too far and said that he was mean to his real-life wives and female characters based on some strange chemical combination of how his life imitated his art. 

Honestly, as a short woman with a thick Southern accent who had always worked in fields traditionally organized and dominated by men, I just could not buy that criticism or see the allegations in his stories or his texts. The ideas all seemed strangely out of context—as if we were expecting him to hit the social mores of post modernism when, in fact, he was long dead before these radical culture shifts took place.  

With the help of the John F. Kennedy Library’s grant program, I was able to visit the Ernest Hemingway archives and read his notes and letters for myself to see if he was, in fact, a womanizer who only cared about being seen as the big man in the room—what I see as the biggest misunderstanding about him.

Twenty years in to a career studying Hemingway textually and archivally and in the classroom with students, I have to say that I do not see him as anything but a talented writer who tried to love his wives and his children to the best of his ability.  He never shortchanged any of his past wives in the divorces, and he never gossiped or ran his mouth about them or his children.  

He did try to help those around him—that much I know. 

One need look no farther than his journalism to see that.  

No matter your politics, read his voice here, angered and confused about what had happened to his countrymen in September of 1935.

305 Duval Street

A model essay for the Finding Florida curriculum

by E. Stone Meredith

I hadn’t really racked ‘em up since I was in my early 20s.  Not in this type of bar, anyway.  And here I was—with my barely-teenaged son on Christmas day, racking them up at Fat Tuesday on Duval.  The street was alive in ways Santa might never imagine that day.  My son had already experienced the thrill of a temporary Sponge Bob tattoo from a blond who had clearly not even hit twenty.  She had quite a business going, with her henna and her large collection of designs.  Her application made my son bullet proof for the day, as was the artist’s innocent, Conch intent. Seeing that wild spirit in him made me decide this was the day to hit the gas for a few moments more—to push a bit longer down the potential of Duval and away from our regular lives in Tampa. So I racked ‘em up and told him to break and to go for it.

And he did.  My Catholic School over-achiever squared all five feet of himself up to that weathered old table and hit the fire out of the break ball.  What a ubiquitous sound for Key West, but what a memory now for me and my Niño.  The balls scattered.  He felt his power and then saw it settle and land.  I heckled and jabbed and laughed and marauded with him as I had done his Godmother all those years ago in the same bar, same location.  Fat Tuesday became part of his manhood and my motherhood and our memories and our longing, I knew then, to always return to this place together.

He was drinking the pain killer—virgin, of course.  Mine was high-test.  Both were filled to the brim by a charismatic machine tender who celebrated the resemblance he noticed between me and my Niño.  Service with a smile.  Everybody gets gassed up on Duval.  That’s what it’s for—to re-center and to get gassed up again before coming back to the ills and limits and tests on the mainland. 

The blinking Christmas lights took me back that day to the early 90s—likely because that’s where my memory always takes me first when I smell that smell of sugar and booze and slushies from those whirling machines.  You walk on the boards from the bar to the pool tables to the front of the bar and back again.  You can feel the machines hum and remind yourself that this is a Key West bar, not a chain from NOLA trying to cash in on a recognized name.  No.  That might be what draws the first timers in.  And let’s be honest—back in ’90, that’s what drew me in because I’d not managed to get my little country ass to the Big Easy yet.  But no more.  No.  The Fat Tuesday on Duval Street is where I felt my freedom at twenty-two.  It is a conduit for continual communion, one sip and one bank shot at a time.