When twenty-nine-year-old Ernest Hemingway arrived in Key West he had already experienced two major military conflicts, extensive European travel and life as an expatriate in Paris. Yet it was Key West that captured his imagination and served as home base for over a decade as he and his wife Pauline traveled, raised their young sons and became a part of the Key West community. Hemingway’s passion for bullfights frequently took him from Key West to Spain, his love of sport fishing and the “great blue river” between Key West and Cuba brought him home. In celebration of Hemingway’s 106th birthday and the 25th anniversary of Hemingway Days, the Key West Art & Historical Society presents: Fishing, Friends and Family: Hemingway in Key West 1928-1939 at the Custom House. This new exhibit brings together many never before exhibited photographs and artifacts from the Key West Art & Historical Society collections, the Bruce Family Archives, and the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. Visitors to the exhibit will be transported to Hemingway’s Key West of the 1930s, a decade that had a profound effect on the nation, the city and the young Ernest Hemingway. Through the use of digital audio wands, available in both English and Spanish, true stories of the writer, his family and friends come to life. Meet Toby Bruce, Hemingway’s friend, confidante and indispensable right hand man and learn why he built the brick wall around Hemingway’s Whitehead Street home. Find out how Pauline Hemingway had a salt water pool installed, and solve the mystery of who painted the cat green. Meet Hemingway’s friends (whom he called “the mob”) camping, fishing and drinking at Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. Imagine reeling in the big with one of Josie “Sloppy Joe” Russell’s 50 pound fishing rods, and read some of Hemingway’s Key West fishing adventures written in his own hand. A photo gallery and discussion theorizes which Key West characters may have appeared as characters in “To Have and Have Not” Hemingway’s novel based on Key West. This exhibit is sponsored in part by Solares Hill Design Group