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As cat lovers, we were thrilled to see the AP news last Thursday that–after a contentious five year legal battle with the U.S. Department of Agriculture–the Ernest Hemingway Home in Key West will be allowed to remain the cathouse of choice for the 50 or so felines that have roamed the grounds there for decades.
The unique, six-toed cats are said to be descended from Hemingway’s cat Snowball, given to him by a visiting ship’s captain during his tenure on the island in the 1930s. (The novelist was a renowned cat lover, and at his later home in Cuba, kept up to 60 cats as pets.)
At the heart of the Key West legal battle was the government’s argument that the property needed an animal exhibition license and that the cats should be caged. The legal dispute began after neighbors’ complaints about the roaming cats in 2003 sparked the Florida Keys Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to raise concerns about the cats’ welfare.
After an extensive investigation, which included video surveillance and the hiring of an independent animal behaviorist, a report issued by a veterinarian from Florida’s College of Veterinary Medicine stated that the cats appeared “well-cared for, healthy and content” (though any of the thousands of visitors to this legendary Key West attraction, including us, would have said that’s a no-brainer after seeing these glamour-pusses–with names like Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn–living in the lap of luxury!). The expert also recommended that a special fence be installed to keep the kitties contained on the property, while leaving them free to roam on the one-acre grounds. Now that’s a purr-fect ending.–Joni Rendon
If you’d like to head to the Lone Star State in November, enter the “Book it to Texas” Sweepstakes. The grand prize is a 4-night trip to Austin to attend the Texas Book Festival, which is taking place November 1st and 2nd on the grounds of the State Capitol. Second prize is a trip to Fort Worth, and the third place winner receives a Barnes & Noble gift basket and gift card. The contest is open through September 25th.
Shannon will be at the Texas Book Festival doing a talk and slide presentation about some of the authors and landmarks featured in Novel Destinations, including Austin’s own literary connection: it’s home to the O. Henry Museum. Check the festival website for details on date and time, which are TBD, as well as a list of the nearly 200 authors who will be in attendance.
“Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than a novelist,” Edith Wharton once claimed. The gardens at her estate, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, are indeed a highlight of the estate, which I visited recently on a day trip with my husband and my mother-in-law. For an afternoon, we traveled to the turn of the twentieth century and envisioned life as Wharton knew it during her tenure as mistress of The Mount.
Wharton had a talent and a passion for architecture and landscape design. She was heavily influenced by her years abroad and drew on classical European design principles for both the house and gardens. Before she penned The House of Mirth, her breakout novel, in an upstairs bedroom suite at The Mount, she co-wrote a book on interior design, The Decoration of Houses, with architect Ogden Codman in 1898. Remarkably, the book is still in print.
The white, three-story mansion is reached by walking along a forested path, and we explored the house on a 
self-guided tour. Highlights are the library (right) with dark wood, carved bookshelves, where Wharton’s personal collection of tomes resides once again after being purchased from a European collector; the drawing room, the largest room in the house and the only one with ornate ceiling treatment; and the dining room, where a cushion placed beneath a Victorian table is reminiscent of one that Wharton kept there for her canine companions. (I was disappointed to find out that Wharton disliked cats and referred to them as sneaks in fur.)
Visitors are allowed on the second level of the house, although it’s currently undergoing restoration work. Wharton’s sitting room is the one that’s most finished, and it has vivid floral paintings set into the paneling, which came from Milan, Italy. One room has been designated the Henry James Guest Suite in honor of Wharton’s fellow writer, her good friend and traveling companion (they once toured France together, where one of their sojourns was to French scribe George Sand’s chateau).
After exploring the house, we had lunch at the Terrace Cafe on the wrap-around porch overlooking a glistening pond and the gorgeous gardens. A broad staircase leads from the terrace to a walkway lined with lime trees. On either end of the walkway are two formal gardens: a French-style flower garden circling a fountain in the shape of a dolphin and an Italian-style giardino segreto (hidden garden; at left) with stone walls and archways.
I was pleased to see there were a lot of people at The Mount on the day I visited, although it didn’t feel crowded because of the sprawling size of the estate. The Mount is open until October 31st. It’s still facing financial difficulties, and it could be a last chance to visit this exquisite place, which is unlike any other literary landmark in the United States. As Henry James said, perhaps while admiring the view from his guest room window, The Mount is “a delicate French chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond.” –Shannon McKenna Schmidt
Our friend Jennifer Hart at www.BookClubGirl.com wrote earlier this week about a fundraiser taking place on September 23rd to benefit the Mark Twain House & Museum, which is in danger of closing. The extravaganza, “Writers Reading for Twain,” features authors Sara Gruen, Tasha Alexander, David Gates, Phillip Lopate, Tom Perrotta, Arthur Phillips, Stewart O’Nan, Amy MacKinnon, Kristy Kiernan, Robert Hicks, Andy Carroll, Philip Beard, and Jon Clinch (whose novel Finn reimagines the life of Huckleberry Finn’s father). Admission is $40 for the reading/signing and $100 to attend a reception along with the reading/signing. Click here for more information about the event.
Jennifer has an excellent suggestion for book club members looking for a way to help support the Mark Twain House, as well as Edith Wharton’s estate, The Mount, in the Berkshires, which is also facing financial troubles: select a Twain or Wharton work to read in your book club and have each member bring $10-20 to donate to the respective author house. If you’re feeling especially generous, do it for both! My book club recently read The House of Mirth, and in our twelve years of meeting we all agreed that it inspired one of our best discussions ever.
And for further proof that classic literary scribes never go out of style (see Tuesday’s post about Edgar Allan Poe making headlines), there is more Mark Twain news. HarperStudio, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, just announced plans to publish Who is Mark Twain? — a collection of 22 previously unpublished short pieces written by Twain — on April 21, 2009, the 99th anniversary of the writer’s death. –Shannon McKenna Schmidt
The next best thing to reading the classics themselves is reading novels that vividly re-imagine the lives of famed authors. The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl immediately comes to mind, as does a new book out this week, Cassandra & Jane by Jill Pitkeathley, who is a guest blogger today on ReadingGroupGuides.com. Her novel illuminates the extraordinary bond between Jane Austen and her beloved sister, Cassandra, who nursed her through ill-health and later (much to the lament of today’s literary biographers and Jane fans) destroyed much of the great author’s correspondence to protect her privacy.
Though there were eight Austen siblings, there were only two girls, and Jane, like a typical younger sister, doted on Cassandra. As their mother once ruefully commented, “if Cassandra’s head had been going to be cut off, Jane would have hers cut off too.” Though not a writer, Cassandra also had a creative bent, and her watercolors graced the pages of Jane’s early parody, The History of England, written when she was just fifteen years old. (You can virtually turn the pages of this youthful literary gem by clicking here on the British Library’s website.)
Most importantly, Cassandra is responsible for the only reasonably certain portrait of the author from life, which is on display in England’s National Gallery. The portrait dates from 1810, a year after the two sisters had moved with their mother into a small cottage in Chawton, England. After the death of George Austen in 1805, the three women were dependent on the charity and goodwill of the Austen brothers for their survival, but nonetheless, the years they spent in Chawton were largely happy ones. (One of my favorite mementos from their time there is a quilt the three women stitched together, which you can check out if you visit the cottage today.)
Unfortunately, a cloud marred their shared happiness in 1816, when Jane’s health started to rapidly decline from a mysterious illness (suspected to be either Addison’s Disease or Hodgkin’s Lymphoma). She died in her sister’s arms a year later on July 18 at the age of 41.–Joni Rendon
Fighting over Edgar Allan Poe’s remains? This weekend the New York Times reported on the ”ghoulish argument” between Philadelphia and Baltimore over the scribe’s final resting place. He’s buried in Baltimore, where he lived as a young man and later died under mysterious circumstances during a return visit. Edward Pettit, a Poe scholar in Philadelphia, argues that Poe should be re-buried in the City of Brotherly Love because he wrote some of his most noteworthy works while living there.
On January 13th, Pettit will defend his views during a debate with Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House in Baltimore; the debate will be held at the Philadelphia Free Library. Jerome’s response to the suggestion that Poe should forever leave Baltimore? “Philadelphia can keep its broken bell and its cheese steak, but Poe’s body isn’t going anywhere.”
I had the chance to meet Mr. Jerome last fall when he gave me a fascinating tour of the Poe House in Baltimore, Poe’s former residence and one of four literary landmarks devoted to the writer. The others are the Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, the Poe Cottage in the Bronx, New York, and the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. January 19, 2009, is the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, and celebrations at the sites are being planned.
Whatever the outcome of the debate over Poe’s legacy, it’s great to see a classic literary figure making modern-day headlines. –Shannon McKenna Schmidt
Ten years after her death in 1998, Dorothy West has been finally been given her due. The writer, whom Langston Hughes nicknamed “the Kid,” was long one of the few surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance. Recently, the Cape Cod home where she spent her final years was dedicated as a site on the Martha’s Vineyard African American Heritage Trail.
Although West had faded into relative anonymity by the time her bestselling second novel, The Wedding, was published in 1995, the writer had established herself as a literary tour de force decades earlier. After one of her early short stories tied for second place with Zora Neale Hurston in a writing competition, Hurston befriended the young writer and encouraged her move to New York, where she was taken under the wing of established Harlem Renaissance greats.
In Harlem, West founded the literary magazine Challenge, which published groundbreaking stories by up and coming writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. In addition to shining the spotlight on the work of her African American contemporaries, she went on to publish her own novel, The Living Is Easy, in 1948 after moving into her family’s modest wood-frame summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. There, she became a Cape Cod fixture, entertaining visitors on her porch when the weather was nice enough and later hosting Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, her editor at Doubleday publishing company, for weekly editing sessions. It was with the former first lady’s encouragement that West was finally able to complete her long-awaited second novel, The Wedding, published nearly fifty years after her first and dedicated to Onassis.
West’s star rose even further in the year of her death when the book was adapted by Oprah into a TV miniseries starring Halle Barry as the novel’s protagonist Shelby Cole, the youngest daughter of a prominent African American family who causes a stir with her plans to marry a white jazz musician. –Joni Rendon
