Zora Neale Hurston, born in 1891, was an American author, anthropologist, and filmmaker. Hurston was the fifth of eight children. Her four grandparents had been born into slavery. When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida. In 1887, it was one of the first all-black towns incorporated in the United States. Hurston said that Eatonville was “home” to her, as she was so young when she moved there from Alabama. Sometimes she claimed it as her birthplace. A few years later, her father was elected as mayor of the town in 1897. In 1902 he was called to serve as minister of its largest church, Macedonia Missionary Baptist. Hurston often used Eatonville as a setting in her stories—it was a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society.
Hurston attended Howard University in Washington, DC in 1924 , and in 1925 Barnard College of Columbia University, a women’s college, where she was the only black student. Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology from Barnard in 1928. Her anthropology research included the study of Vodun, commonly called Voodoo, by the public. The name was derived from the god Vodun of the West African Yoruba people. Its roots may go back 6,000 years in Africa.
The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford, an attractive, confident, middle-aged black woman, returns to Eatonville, Florida, after a long absence. The black townspeople gossip about her and -speculate about where she has been and what has happened to her young husband, Tea Cake. Janie’s friend Pheoby Watson visits her to find out what has happened. Their conversation frames the story that Janie relates in the novel.
Hurston first achieved a level of mainstream institutional support in the 1970s. Alice Walker published an essay, “Looking for Zora”, in Ms. magazine in 1975. In that work, she described how the Black community’s general rejection of Hurston was like “throwing away a genius”.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” is a non-fiction work by Zora Neale Hurston. It is based on her interviews in 1927 with Cudjoe Lewis, the last presumed living survivor of a slave cargo ship. The book failed to find a publisher, in part because it was written in black vernacular, and also in part because it described the involvement of other African people in the business of Atlantic slave trade.
The full book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”, was finally published in 2018 with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Alice Walker. It was said upon its publishing that Barracoon brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last “Black Cargo” ship to arrive in the United States.
At age 60, Hurston had to fight “to make ends meet” with the help of public assistance. At one point she worked as a maid on Miami Beach’s Rivo Alto Island. During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke. She died of hypertensive heart disease on January 28, 1960, and was buried at the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida. Her remains were in an unmarked grave until 1973. Novelist Alice Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried; they decided to mark it as hers. Walker commissioned a gray marker inscribed with “ZORA NEALE HURSTON / A GENIUS OF THE SOUTH / NOVELIST FOLKLORIST / ANTHROPOLOGIST.”
Marjorie Rawlings came to Florida to visit in 1926 and fell in love with the land. Two years later, she returned to buy 72 acres at Cross Creek, near Gainesville, dividing her time between growing oranges and writing fiction.The surrounding landscape at Cross Creek gave her the setting for her stories. Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captures the richness of north central Florida life at Cross Creek. Marjorie’s writing style was as backwoodsy as the scrub country she described.
In 1938, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Yearling, her best-known work about a young boy named Jody who lives in rural Florida, and adopts an orphaned fawn as a pet. As both the boy and the fawn grow, Jody struggles with the practical hardships of life on a farm, family relationships and expectations, and his responsibilities as he approaches adulthood. This story was based on actual events. However, in real life it was a girl who adopted the fawn.
Several of her books have been made into movies including The Yearling and a semiautobiographical work entitled Cross Creek. In this book, she describes how she first arrived in Florida and came to love its rural way of life, despite the hardships it entailed. Rawlings, who loved food, entertaining, and growing vegetables and herbs, followed Cross Creek with the publication of Cross Creek Cookery.
Today, her home at Cross Creek has become the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park.
Harry Eugene Crews was born in south Georgia but is most often associated with Florida where he studied writing at the University of Florida. His parents, Myrtice and Ray Crews, were poor tenant farmers. After his father died of a heart attack in the middle of the night with Crews, just twenty-two months old, asleep beside him, Myrtice soon married Ray’s brother Pascal. Her decision would prove fateful, as Pascal revealed himself to be a violent and dangerous drunk.
In his memoir Crews describes the tenuous situation of his early family life: “The world that circumscribed the people I come from had so little margin for error, for bad luck, that when something went wrong, it almost always brought something else down with it. It was a world in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.”Raw courage was needed early, as Crews experienced two major physical setbacks as a child.
At the age of five, he was struck with a fever followed by leg cramps so severe that his heels drew up to the backs of his thighs. He was bedridden for more than six weeks before he could be carried around the farm. He then gradually began to walk again by hauling himself along a fence.
Later in life Crews would blame psychological stress from his increasingly volatile home life as the cause.When he was six, an accident during a children’s game called “pop-the-whip” caused him to be thrown into a cast-iron boiler being used to scald pigs. With burns covering more than two-thirds of his body, Crews survived, doctors told him, only because his head had stayed above water. He describes the ordeal in his memoir: “Then hands were on me, taking off my clothes, and the pain turned into something words cannot touch, or at least my words cannot touch. There is no way for me to talk about it because when my shirt was taken off, my back came off with it. When my overalls were pulled down, my cooked and glowing skin came down.”
Crews joined the marines when he was seventeen, while his brother was away fighting in the Korean War (1950-53). During his time in the service, Crews began to read seriously. When his term ended, he enrolled at the University of Florida on the G.I. Bill, with the intention of becoming a writer. The Agrarian writer Andrew Lytle, who had once taught Flannery O’Connor and James Dickey, was Crews’s undergraduate writing teacher.
Crews published continuously since his first novel, on average of one novel per year. He died in 2012, at the age of 78.
At the time of his death in 1986, John D. MacDonald was the author of 78 books, with more than 75 million copies in print. Combined with hundreds of short works of fiction, MacDonald’s career achievements as an American mystery writer remain unparalleled. Dozens of his most celebrated works featured Florida’s culture and environment, most notably his series of 21 “Travis McGee” novels which profoundly influenced an elite corps of environmentally conscious writers in Florida and elsewhere.
In 1950, MacDonald published his first novel, The Brass Cupcake, a hard-boiled detective novel based in Florida. Over the next 15 years, MacDonald would use his Harvard business training and knowledge of the seamy side of the corporate world to frame more than 40 mystery novels, an astonishing output that established him as the “king” of American pulp fiction.
His first book to catch the attention of Hollywood was The Executioners, published in 1958. The 1991 film “Cape Fear” directed by Martin Scorsese was was based on MacDonald’s The Executioners and was a remake of the 1962 film of the same name also based on John D. MacDonald’s novel, The Executioners. The 1991 film stars Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, and Jessica Lange.
By 1964, four other MacDonald novels inspired movie or TV productions, making the author a world-famous (and wealthy) man.
By the early 1960s, MacDonald had become a staunch environmentalist, alarmed over what he saw rampant development doing to his beloved adopted home. As a means of calling public attention to the wholesale destruction of Florida’s natural areas, in 1964 MacDonald launched his most famous work–a long series of detective novels set in Florida and featuring “Travis McGee” as protagonist.
MacDonald set his main character in Fort Lauderdale, living aboard a houseboat he’d won in a poker game, The Busted Flush. “McGee” is an ex-football player and Korean War veteran who is a hero, who finds the means to help powerless, largely innocent people who are threatened by various criminal or immoral elements. MacDonald used “McGee” to comment on such social issues as ecological insensitivity, political corruption, real estate scams, racism and infidelity. The hugely popular run of 21 “Travis McGee” novels began with The Deep Blue Good-by (1964) and ended with The Lonely Silver Rain in 1984. All of the novels contained a color in their titles as a marketing device for the series.
MacDonald’s “McGee” series is credited as the spark that ignited an entire genre of Florida-based fiction built around the state’s struggle to deal with enormous social and ecological problems brought on by a spiraling influx of people.
Such prominent novelists as Carl Hiassen (whose “McGee” is an ex-governor-turned-environmentalist named “Skink”); James W. Hall; Randy Wayne White and Tim Dorsey continue to write in the best tradition of MacDonald’s “McGee” series. Hiassen is quoted as calling MacDonald “the first modern writer to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise and breath-grabbing beauty.”
MacDonald punctuated his “McGee” years with other Florida-based novels with an environmental theme. His 1977 novel Condominium, an indictment of bad development in the face of hurricanes, spent 27 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The story was turned into a TV drama starring Barbara Eden and Dan Haggerty.
MacDonald’s influence on literature was hardly confined to Florida. Novelists Kurt Vonnegut, Dean Koontz , Jonathan Kellerman, Mary Higgins Clark and Stephen King were long-time admirers. King called MacDonald “the great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller.”
MacDonald collected numerous awards over his career, including the French Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere (1964) and the American Book Award in 1980. He died of complications following heart surgery December 1986.
Carl Hiaasen was born and raised in Florida, where he still lives.
Tourist Season, published in 1986, was Hiaasen’s first solo novel. GQ magazine called it “one of the 10 best destination reads of all time,” though it failed to frighten a single tourist away from Florida. His next effort, Double Whammy, was the first (and possibly only) novel ever written about sex, murder and corruption on the professional bass-fishing tour.
Since then, Hiaasen has published Skin Tight, Native Tongue and nine national bestsellers – Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, Lucky You, Sick Puppy, Basket Case, Skinny Dip, Nature Girl, Star Island and Bad Monkey.
Dave Barry is an author and columnist who wrote syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. He has also written numerous books of humor and parody, as well as comic novels. Barry’s honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary (1988) and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism (2005).
Big Trouble is a 2002 American neo-noir crime comedy film based on Barry’s novel Big Trouble. Like much of Dave Barry’s fiction, it follows a diverse group of people through a series of extremely strange and humorous situations against the backdrop of Miami.
Randy Wayne White is an American writer of crime fiction and non-fiction adventure tales. He has written New York Times best-selling novels and has received awards for his fiction and a television documentary. He is best known for his series of crime novels featuring the retired NSA agent Doc Ford,a marine biologist living on the Gulf Coast of southern Florida. White has contributed material on a variety of topics to numerous magazines and has lectured across the United States. A resident of Southwest Florida since 1972, he lives on Sanibel Island, where he is active in South Florida civic affairs and owns the restaurant Doc Ford’s Sanibel Rum Bar & Grill.
James W. Hall is an American author and professor from Florida. He has written eighteen novels, four books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays. Hall is best known for a series of crime/mystery novels starring the character Thorn. Thorn partners with his private-eye friend Sugarman to thwart a range of villains. Hall’s writing often features a South Florida backdrop and explores the contrast between squalor and poverty coexisting with tremendous wealth and glamor.
Hall began his career as a poet. He taught at Florida International University in Miami for 40 years and founded the school’s creative writing program in the early 1970s. He and his wife divide their time between South Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.
Tim Dorsey is an American novelist. He is known for a series starring Serge A. Storms, a mentally disturbed vigilante antihero who rampages across Florida enforcing his own moral code against a variety of low-life criminals.
James Swain is a longtime resident of Odessa, Florida, and has used Florida settings in many of his bestsellers. His award-winning 21st book, No Good Deed, is set entirely around Tampa Bay. Swain’s mystery novels have included a notable series about gambling investigator Tony Valentine and magician Peter Warlock. (Swain himself is a skilled magician and expert on gambling crime.)
Swain began doing magic as a kid; when he was 12, he and David Copperfield had the same magic teacher. Swain began writing almost as early, at 15, and studied the craft at New York University, where his teachers included Ralph Ellison and Anatole Broyard.
After graduating from the New York University, he began working as a magazine editor and screenwriter. Following his move to Florida, he started an advertising firm and his career began as a Florida novelist.
Laurence Shames is best known for his series of comic mysteries, all set in Key West, Florida. One of his most popular books, however, Bad Twin, was written under the pseudonym Gary Troup, in a cross promotion between publisher Hyperion and ABC, the network which produced the TV series, Lost. In Lost, Troup was a fictional character who was presumed dead in the airline crash that was the basis for the TV series, and he left a manuscript behind, leading viewers of the series to buy the book to find clues to the mysteries of Lost.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s 1947 best seller, The Everglades: River of Grass, raised America’s consciousness and transformed the Florida Everglades from an area that was looked upon as a useless swamp – to be drained and developed commercially – to a national park that is seen as a valuable environmental resource to be protected and preserved. After this successful campaign to preserve the Everglades as a national park, Douglas continued her work by founding the Friends of the Everglades, a conservation organization still active today.
Always ahead of her time, Douglas graduated from Wellesley College as an English major in 1912. A few years later, Douglas went to Miami to be a reporter for her father’s newspaper, which later became The Miami Herald. During World War I, she served with the American Red Cross in Europe. After the war, she launched her career as a newspaper editor at her father’s paper. Many of her editorials focused on what she perceived to be Florida’s increasing problem of rapid commercial development. In the 1920s, she left the newspaper to launch a second career as an author. Over the years she published many books and short stories, both fiction and non-fiction – most for adults but several for children – especially focusing on women, the history and life in southern Florida and environmental issues. She also engaged in a number of other campaigns and charity work to improve society: campaigns against slum-lords and for improved housing conditions, for free milk for babies whose parents needed aid, and for the ratification of the Women’s Suffrage Amendment.
Most important, she dedicated her life to preserving and restoring the Everglades. She lived long enough to witness great successes. In 1996, for example, Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment that held polluters primarily responsible for cleaning up the Everglades. And the Florida and federal governments have authorized multimillion-dollar projects to restore and expand the Everglades. In recognition of her tireless and successful struggle, the state of Florida named the headquarters of its Department of Natural Resources after her.
Awarding Mrs. Douglas the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993, President Clinton recognized her achievements. Upon her death in 1998 at the age of 108, President Clinton said: “Long before there was an Earth Day, Mrs. Douglas was a passionate steward of our nation’s natural resources, and particularly her Florida Everglades.
No famous writer is more synonymous with the community of Key West than Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway came to Key West after living in Paris with his second wife Pauline. Pauline became pregnant and she wanted to move back to the United States to have the baby. While back in the US Hemingway fell in love with Key West. Key West fed his passion for the outdoors in the island breezes and the laid-back atmosphere. Florida provided him with a new bohemian existence, markedly different than that of Paris. Before Key West Hemingway was already famous for his writing but his active life in Key West further developed his macho image as an outdoors man and a sport fisherman. Hemingway wrote several of his novels (or at least parts of them) during his time in Key West, including For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, and several short stories including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
See the following video of Hemingway’s life below and the full interview with Dr. James Hutchinson on the BookZooms tab of this website.