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from the KEY WEST ART & HISTORICAL SOCIETY 281 FRONT STREET, KEY WEST, FL 33040 295-6616 Fax: 295-6649 |
Attention: News editors, news directors, features editors and programming directors. Please use the following item as a news story, public service announcement or community event. Pix available. For immediate release. |
Author Carlene Fredericka Brennen’s “Hemingway’s Cats”, a hardcover book with 190 black-and-white photos, explores the life of Ernest Hemingway, the women he loved, and the cats and dogs he befriended throughout his life. His animals often helped him to cope with his failing relationships, deep-seated loneliness, and life-threatening diseases. Brennen will sign her book at the Custom House, 281 Front St., on Saturday, July 22, from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The more Brennen researched Hemingway’s complex life and close association to animals, the more she came to understand Hemingway the man, the lover, the husband, the father, the hunter, the fisherman, the writer, as well as the devoted master of many cats and dogs. She discovered a kinder, gentler man known only to family and close friends, quite different from the macho character he himself helped to create—a man part fact, part fiction. Brennen, a Hemingway Scholar, has spent more than 30 years researching Hemingway’s life in Key West, Bimini, and Cuba. She coordinated the International Hemingway Festival on Sanibel Island for three years (1997-99) and the First Annual Hemingway Flats Fishing Tournament on Captiva Island in 1997. Before “Hemingway’s Cats,” she co-wrote with Hilary Hemingway “Hemingway in Cuba” and worked on the award-winning PBS documentary film by the same name. She lives in Fort Myers, Florida with her husband Terry. In 1943 Ernest Hemingway, living in Cuba with his third wife, Martha, and 11 cats, wrote to his first wife Hadley: “One cat just leads to another. . . . The place is so damned big it doesn’t really seem as though there were many cats until you see them all moving like a mass migration at feeding time. . .” All his life Ernest Hemingway surrounded himself with cats and dogs and sought their comfort during times of loneliness and stress. They appear in many of his writings, particularly in “A Moveable Feast,” “Islands in the Stream,” “The Garden of Eden,” and “True at First Light” — all written late in his life and as close to autobiography as he came.
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