We’ve been drifting over the archives this week and have hauled in a coolerful of keepers. The trophies are below, but make sure to visit our Flickr page for more of these unique images from the early years of the Key West Literary Seminar.
The 1989 Key West Literary Seminar examined the American short story and featured informal events at venues including Capt. Tony’s Saloon on Greene Street. Here, notorious barman and former Key West mayor Tony Tarracino (r) shares a laugh inside his establishment with longtime Esquire editor and KWLS board member Rust Hills, Sally Fiedler, and her husband, the influential literary critic Leslie Fiedler.
KWLS co-founder and novelist David Kaufelt’s literary walking tours offered a writer’s-eye view of unique Key West architecture. This 1986 photo captures the tour in front of the Richard Peacon house at 712 Eaton St., then owned by designer Calvin Klein.
The 1993 Seminar, "The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop," was organized by poet, critic, and essayist John Malcolm Brinnin. Brinnin, in white, began the Seminar by discussing Bishop with Nobel Prize-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz.
Literary agent Dick Duane was having lunch in New York with David Kaufelt when the idea for the Key West Literary Seminar first came up. Here’s Duane at the 1986 Seminar.
Outsider poet and publisher Kirby Congdon has been a Key West fixture for decades. Here, he makes his way through the lobby of the historic San Carlos Institute during a break in the 1993 Seminar.
At a party during the 1992 Seminar, "Literature and Film," screenwriter, novelist, and sportswriter Bud Schulberg (center) joined former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur (l), author of Key West Writers and their Houses Lynn Kaufelt, fiction writer Joy Williams, and founder David Kaufelt.
Doyle Bush
Jeffrey Cardenas
Richard Watherwax
Jeffrey Cardenas
Richard Watherwax
photographer unknown
