A stormy, tropical romance

This week's column is by Editor-in-Chief Inez Sharp.

In the winter of 1936, a beautiful, young woman walked into Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Florida. The bar was a run-down sort of place; sloppy like its name, it smelled of stale liquor and was peopled with rum-runners, drunks and those of no fixed abode. The tall blonde, dressed elegantly in black, immediately caught the attention of the clientele. She, though, took no notice of the admiring glances and headed straight for a handsome man who was chatting to the barkeeper.

The conversation that ensued is lost, but we do know that the young journalist, Martha Gellhorn, had come to Key West specifically to get to know the handsome drinker at the bar, Ernest Hemingway. What followed was an adventurous but stormy relationship that took Gellhorn and Hemingway first to the civil war in Spain, then to a shared home in Cuba, on to the battlefields of World War II Europe and later to China.

Having visited Key West, I like to think that it was the very special atmosphere of the tropical island town that favoured the beginning of this epic romance. We give you a taste of this atmosphere in this month's Travelogs, the eight-page mini-magazine that comes free with Spotlight.

Martha Gellhorn's best writings are available in two collections: The Face of War (ISBN-13: 978-1-86-207150-6) and The View from the Ground (ISBN-13: 978-0-87-113212-3). Several of Gellhorn's books are also available in German from our Sprachenshop.