SPEAK   FLORIDIAN

                                                                                                                       continued

                   FLORIDA Writers and Prose 

Deane and Chris hope you take a look at our glimpse of Florida literary folks. There are hundreds of nationally recognized writers linked to Florida. Here are ten.

                             Florida famous writers

There are some famous authors identified with Florida. Here are two.

Ernest Hemingway’s writings had a great influence on American writers. Many of his works are regarded as classics of American literature. Hemingway chose Key West, Florida for his home.

Hemingway began his writing career as a reporter. He left that job within a few months to serve as an American Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I. After the war, Hemingway served as a war correspondent and settled in Paris. Hemingway heard about Key West from a friend. On the way back from Paris, he stopped at the tiny Florida island. He soon discovered that life in remote Key West was like living in a foreign country while still perched on the southernmost tip of America. Hemingway loved it. “It’s the best place I’ve ever been anytime, anywhere, flowers, tamarind trees, guava trees, coconut palms…”

In 1952, Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea. It was about an old Cuban fisherman. The old man had not been catching much. This time he caught a huge fish. He battled for the fish with sharks. Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for this short novel. In 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in literature. Hemingway wrote, “Each book should be a new beginning where he (the author) tries again for something that is beyond attainment.” Ernest Hemingway, the adventurer, approached life that way.

                                         CREDIT GRATFULLY GIVEN TO

Exploring Florida: A Social Studies Resource for Students and Teachers
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida

                                        Funded by the Florida Department of Education

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe, best known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin , also wrote about Florida. In the late 1800s she describes Florida as, “a tumble-down, wild, panicky kind of life—this general happy-go-luckiness which (is) Florida.” Her descriptions of picnicking, sailing, and river touring expeditions and her simple stories of events and people in this tropical “winter summer” land became the first promotional writing to interest northern tourists in Florida. In the 1860s, the Stowes purchased property in Mandarin, Florida, on the St. Johns River (near Jacksonville). During her writing career of 51 years, she published many books and shorter pieces. She wrote on a wide range of subjects including homemaking, raising children, and religion. She wrote poems, travel books, biographical sketches, and children’s books. In 1872, Stowe published Palmetto Leaves. The book was a compilation of pieces she wrote after she and her husband began wintering in Mandarin. It is a book filled with ink drawings and words about the people and wildlife of the area. An article titled “Our Florida Plantation” by Harriet Beecher Stowe was printed in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1879. To the right are some excerpts. At her best, Stowe was an early and effective realist. Her portraits of local social life and her settings communicate the culture of her time. She provides us today a picture of the Florida of her time, the 1800s.

Our Florida Plantation It was a hazy, dreamy, sultry February day, such as comes down from the skies of Florida in the opening of spring. A faint scent of orange blossoms was in the air, though as yet there seemed to be only white buds on the trees. The deciduous forests along the banks of the broad St. John’s were just showing that misty dimness which announces the opening of young buds. The river lay calm as a mirror, streaked here and there with broad bands of intenser blue which melted dreamily into purplish mists in the distance… At last we came to the plantation house, a rambling, one-story cottage, with a veranda twelve feet wide in front. It was situated in a yard enclosed by a picket fence, under a tuft of magnificent Spanish oaks… The plantation, we were told, had been in former days the leading one in Florida. It included nine thousand acres--there was a touch of the magnificent in this fact. It had employed five hundred slaves. It had raised quantities of the long-staple cotton, held to be the very finest variety of that necessary article; it had raised, beside, harvests of sugarcane, and in the days before the great frost of 1835 was said to have had a fine productive orange grove, of which by the bye, not a trace remained.

                                                CREDIT GRATFULLY GIVEN TO

Exploring Florida: A Social Studies Resource for Students and Teachers
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida

                                        Funded by the Florida Department of Education

 

                              Other prominent writers

James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), well known for his 1912 novel Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. He was also the first black to be admitted to the Florida bar (1897) and was a founder and secretary of the NAACP.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890–1998), who came to Miami in 1915, was the author of several works reflecting her concern for the environment, including The Everglades: River of Grass (first published in 1947), Hurricane (1958), and Florida: The Long Frontier (1967)

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1895–1953) came to Florida in 1928 to do creative writing. She authored many books. After her first novel, South Moon Under (1933), came the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling (1938), the poignant story of a 12-year-old boy on the Florida frontier in the 1870s.

Zora Neale Hurston (1901–60), born in poverty in the all-Negro town of Eatonville and a graduate of Barnard College, spent four years collecting folklore, which she published in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938). She wrote, “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.” Hurston certainly“jumped at de sun.”
Hurston is noted as the first Black American to collect and publish African-American and Afro-Caribbean folklore. She wrote stories, novels, and an autobiography.

 

                            More recent writers

Lillian Smith   Strange Fruit  Born in 1897 to a wealthy white family in Jasper Florida (a town near the Georgia border) Lillian Smith was first and foremost a civil rights activist. ...

James Dickey  Deliverance  When he came back from this, his second tour of duty, he taught at Rice University in Texas and then at the University of Florida. ...

Joshilyn Jackson Gods in Alabama I was born in the Florida panhandle, spitting distance from Alabama. My father was military, so my early years were spent all over, mostly in the ...

         

        Finally read 'Going South With the Warblers.... etc'

Winthrop Packard, naturalist and writer, Author of Wild Pastures, Wood Wanderings, and Florida Trails

Excerpt from Chapter One, "Going South With the Warblers" Florida Trails, 1910

I had not expected to find a zebra so far north, yet he galloped by the door one torrid day showing his black and yellow stripes most tantalizingly. He was so near that the brilliant red dots which are a part of his color scheme showed plainly and added to his beauty. I have said galloped; I might better perhaps have written loped in describing his flight, for the zebra of this story is not a quadruped, but a butterfly.

                                              CREDIT GRATFULLY GIVEN TO

Exploring Florida: A Social Studies Resource for Students and Teachers
Produced by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology,
College of Education, University of South Florida

                                        Funded by the Florida Department of Education

 

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