Following Hemingway's Tracks In Madrid

When I was stationed in Scotland on a Navy Tugboat at the U.S. nuclear submarine base in the mid-1970s, I was deep into reading Hemingway's novels and short stories.

Influenced by Hemingway's stories, I traveled to Italy, France and Spain. I would later visit Key West and other places where the great writer lived and worked and used those locations as backdrops for his stories.

I have particularly fond memories of my visit to Madrid. I visited the city because of Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises.

Other writers and readers have followed Hemingway's path to Madrid, including David Farley, who wrote an interesting travel piece for the New York Times.   

I was instead following the tracks of that American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is associated with a handful of places around the planet — most notably Paris, Pamplona, Havana, Key West and Ketchum, Idaho, where he took his own life in July 1961. But none may have held a warmer spot in his heart than Madrid, which he called “the most Spanish of all cities,” referring to its diverse population from every region of the country. He also titled a short story based in Madrid “The Capital of the World.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/travel/a-tour-of-hemingways-madrid.html