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Also by William McKeen:

Mile Marker Zero, October 2011
Hardcover
Outlaw Journalist, July 2008
Hardcover

MILE MARKER ZERO
By: William McKeen

The Moveable Feast of Key West

Crown
October 2011
On Sale: October 4, 2011
320 pages
ISBN: 0307592006
EAN: 9780307592002
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction

True tales of writers and pirates, painters and potheads, guitar pickers and drug merchants in America’s southernmost city
 
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—one defined by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson—there was another moveable feast: KeyWest, Florida.

The small town on the two-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 American writers. Some of the artists went there to be literary he-men. Some went to re-create themselves. Others just went to disappear—and 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.

Mile Marker Zero tells 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 generation that invented, reinvented, and found itself at the unending cocktail party at the end—and the beginning—of America’s highway.

Media Buzz

On Point - October 4, 2011