Inspiration: In the fall of 1998, I was living in Mobile, Alabama, where I taught at a university. But I had recently decided that, come spring, I would leave academia and scholarly study to start a new career writing popular history for general readers. That meant I had to come up with a topic suitable for such an audience, which is not as easy as it might sound. One day in late September I was driving home from my office and listening to “All Things Considered,” the nightly news program on National Public Radio. Hurricane season was in full swing and the monster named Georges was wreaking havoc in the Caribbean and heading for south Florida (eventually it turned course and clobbered Mobile and the Gulf Coast, too). A reporter was at a place called Key West, interviewing people about their preparedness for the storm. He talked to a ninety-two year old woman who had lived at Key West her entire life. Was she scared, he asked. No, the woman replied with some disdain in her voice. She’d been through a worse storm in Havana in 1928. This was nothing compared to that. I had no idea where Key West was (except, vaguely, that it was somewhere on or near the southwestern coast of the United States), but I knew this much: South Florida had not been settled until the early twentieth century. If this woman had lived in the area her whole life, her family had obviously been pioneers and that was a tale in itself. I also knew that Havana had been a major tourist destination for wealthy Americans in the 1920s (in part because it was close, but also because booze was legal there). For whatever reason--and who knows why the brain does what it does--something about all of this struck me as terrifically romantic and exciting. Even before I arrived at my driveway, I had already decided: I would find out where Key West was and if there was a story to be told, that’s what I would write about. Once home, I pulled out an atlas and found the place: an island off the coast of Florida. Even better! Islands are always exciting. Next morning I started digging. First task: find out if the subject had been written to death. It had not: I found only one substantive history of the place and it was a booster’s compendium published in 1912. But as every historian knows, no books might mean the story is not worth telling. I found a copy of that 1912 history in a nearby library and started reading. Halfway through I knew: there was plenty to tell about this Florida island. Even more, it turned out, than I first knew. My research uncovered one fascinating, lively, sometimes awful, sometimes weird tale after another. Key West was a storyteller’s dream. But as I read and wrote, I realized something else: The story of Key West was the story of America writ small. This was a place settled by men and women of fierce determination and ambition; an island where dreamers turned vision into reality; a city where the American passion for entrepreneurship and creativity have collided over and over with often dramatic and always surprising results. I finally visited the place two years later--and like most people who go there, was hooked. In many ways, that visit and the task of writing the book changed my life. Psychologically and aesthetically, Key West is about as far away from Iowa as it’s possible to be and still be in the United States. I befriended people I would not have otherwise met; fell in love with an exotic and beautiful island; and have made annual visits to it a regular part of my life-routine. Maybe you’ve had, or hope to have, the same Key West encounter. In any case, I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as I did writing it.