Hemingway aficionados and sun worshipers view Key West as a tropical paradise, and scores of writers have set tales of mystery and romance on the island. The city's real story, told by social historian Maureen Ogle, is as fabulous as fiction. The city's pioneer founders battled Indians, pirates, and deadly disease. In 1861, Union troops seized the strategically located island. In the early 1890s, Key West Cubans helped Jose Martí launch the Cuban war of independence, and a few years later the battleship Maine steamed out of Key West harbor on its fatal voyage. In the 1920s and 1930s, painters, rumrunners, and writers (including Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost) discovered Key West. During World War II, the federal government and the military war machine permanently altered the island's landscape, and in the second half of the 20th century, bohemians, hippies, gays, and jet-setters began writing a new chapter in its history.--From publisher description.