MODERN LITERATURE & GRAND HOTELS

The Plaza Hotel might have been Fitzgerald’s true love, while Ritz Paris had Hemingway’s heart. Why did glamorous hotels evoke such passion in the greatest writers of a generation? We run through years of colourful history

- JULIAN MANNING

The nostalgia that warms the lacquered lobbies of the world’s surviving grand hotels is potent: as inviting as cognac on a cold night. These hotels came to life circa the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, the likes of The Cecil, London and The Mandarin Oriental, Bangkok, standing as well chiselled epitomes of modernity. A century later, and they still maintain a voguish quality, although the appeal is now a sentimental one, anchored in the legacies of the modernist writers that once flocked to these lavish institutions; for instance, if you want to stay in a suite named after Ernest Hemingway, you’ll have to choose between the Ritz Paris, Istanbul’s Pera Palace, Old Havana’s Hotel Ambos Mundos, and many more.

These hotels became such a big part of some authors’ lives, it’s difficult to talk of their work extensively without referencing the hotels they called home—some for days, others for years. Hemingway once said of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald that “[W] e can take your liver out and give it to the Princeton Museum, your heart to the Plaza Hotel.” To understand how these love affairs came to be, one must travel back to the first industrial revolution, to a time before widespread travel was considered grand.

PALACES AND PAPERBACKS