Checking into Hotel Florida

The Dilemmas of an Overwhelmed Historian Amanda Vaill

It started with a quotation. "In those days," wrote Ernest Hemingway, in a letter intended to publicize the 1939 premiere of his play The Fifth Column, "Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, Henry T. Gorrell of United Press, Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express, Martha Gellhorn of Colliers, Virginia Cowles, then for Hearst, now of the London Times, Joris Ivens, who made the 'Spanish Earth,' Johnny Ferno, who photographed it, Josephine Herbst for various American weeklies and for humanity in general, Sidney Franklin working for me, all International Brigade men on leave, and the greatest and most varied collection of ladies of the evening I have ever seen all lived at the Hotel Florida.... [Y]ou could learn as much at the Hotel Florida in those years as you could learn anywhere in the world." I had been looking for a new book subject, circling around the 1930s, a decade of dangerous and fascinating transitions, when I read this letter in an article for The New York Times about an upcoming revival of The Fifth Column. Days earlier I'd seen a different news item about the discovery, in Mexico City, of a cache of Spanish Civil War negatives taken by the legendary combat photographer Robert Capa and remembered that Capa, too, had been at the Hotel Florida. Could his negatives, most of them never before seen, be a part of the story Hemingway's letter suggested? Read on...