Mile Marker Zero

Mile Marker Zero
The Moveable Feast
of Key West

New York: Crown Publishers, 2011

For Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there was Paris in the twenties. For others, later, there was Greenwich Village, Big Sur, and Woodstock. But for an even later generation-- Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson and others -- there was another moveable feast: Key West, Florida.

Mile Marker Zero tells the
story of the small town on the two-mile-by-

four-mile island has long been an artistic haven, a wild refuge

for people of all persuasions, and the inspirational home for a league of great Amer-

ican writers.

Some of the artists went there to be literary he-men. Some went to re-create themselves. Others just went to disappear -- and they succeeded.

No matter what inspired the trip, Key West in the seventies was the right place at the right time, where and when an astonishing collection of artists wove a web of creative inspiration.

Here’s the story of how these writers and artists found their identities in Key West, and maintained their friendships over the decades, despite oceans of booze and boatloads of pot, through serial marriages and sexual escapades, in that dangerous paradise.

Unlike the ‘Lost Generation’ of Paris in the twenties, we have a lost-and-found generation that invented and reinvented itself at the unending cocktail party at the end—and the beginning—of the road.

“A tall but telescopic-sight-true tale of Hunter Thompson, Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and a large cavorting cast running around with sand in their shoes at ‘ground zero for

lust and greed and most of

the other deadly sins,’ Key West.”

TOM WOLFE

"Mile Marker Zero is a wonderful zinger of a book. Every page sings a story worth a Jimmy Buffett song."

DOUGLAS BRINKLEY