Exploring the backstory that led to the writing of Graham Greene's beloved satirical spy novel, Our Man Down in Havana evokes this pivotal time and place in the author's life. When U.S. immigration authorities deported Graham Greene from Puerto Rico in 1954, the British author made an unplanned visit to Havana and discovered that "every vice was permissible and every trade possible" in a Caribbean fleshpot of mafia-run casinos and nude revues. The...

Ernest Hemingway resided in Cuba longer than he lived anywhere else in the world, yet no book has been devoted to how his life in Cuba influenced his writing. Hemingway, Cuba, and the Cuban Works corrects this omission by presenting contributions by scholars and journalists from the United States, Russia, Japan, and Cuba, who explore how Hemingway absorbed and wrote from the culture and place around him. The volume opens with an examination of Hemingway's...

By what marvelous alchemy did Ernest Hemingway come to spend 22 of his 61 years living in Cuba? It began with a fishing expedition. It continued with his meeting Martha Gellhorn, an attractive blonde journalist, in Sloppy Joe's Bar in Key West, Florida, in December of 1936. By 1939, Hemingway was dissolving his marriage to second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, with the aid of Gellhorn. He was just starting to write "For Whom the Bell Tolls", his novel about...