The 2024 hurricane season has been especially disastrous, and the casualties and widespread damage from flooding and high winds in towns like Cedar Key, Florida, call to mind another historic hurricane, the Labor Day hurricane of 1935.
As one of the editors of “The Letters of Ernest Hemingway Volume 6 (1934-1936),” with Sandra Spanier and Miriam B. Mandel, I am reminded of the eyewitness account that the writer, then a resident of Key West, Florida, gave of the catastrophic storm that leveled Upper Matecumbe Key and Lower Matecumbe Key and took the lives of more than 400 people, many of them World War I veterans.
