3. Hemingway’s first polydactyl cat was named Snow White (or Snowball)—or so the story goes.

3. Hemingway’s first polydactyl cat was named Snow White (or Snowball)—or so the story goes.

In her book Hemingway’s Cats, Carlene Fredericka Brennen writes that Hemingway’s son, Patrick, said in an interview that his father never had a cat in Key West. Later, a neighbor wrote that “his family had several polydactyl cats, possibly some of the forebears of the cats in Key West now known as the famed ‘Hemingway’s Cats.’”
But according to The Hemingway House and Museum website, Hemingway received a six-toed white feline from the captain of a ship, and some of the cats at Hemingway’s Key West house are descended from that cat. A 1985 article in the Fort Lauderdale News quoted a guest relating that a guide had told him, “Ernest met this sea captain at Sloppy Joe’s Bar one night and the two of them got drunk and then the sea captain gave Ernest a multi-toed cat off his ship.”