Robin Marantz Henig

It was the first day of the 2001 Key West Literary Seminar — an annual event that attracts hundreds of readers and writers to the southernmost town in the United States — and one of the panelists was observing that the whole enterprise of literary seminars seemed pretty weird. “What if someone looked down from another planet and saw what was going on here?” asked Timothy Ferris, a best-selling science writer brought to Key West to hold forth, with a dozen or so others, on “Science and Literature: Narratives of Discovery.” “How would you explain it to him?” Jacket cover from “The Sweeping Wind,” a memoir by Paul De Kruif. Published by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York Jacket Design by Sidney Butchkes ©1962 by Paul de Kruif As he asked this, Ferris was sitting under a yellow and white striped tent in the courtyard of the Wrecker’s Museum, the oldest house in Key West. He was at a huge round table, one of at least 30 scattered across the lawn, eating from a