Human Evolution was in a second story bedroom that looked out on the Sarasota Bay, and Twentieth Century Art History took place in their pink and blue carriage house. I went to college on land that had once been theirs and took classes in their former mansions. Originally from Iowa, they started buying up land in the 1910s and within ten years they owned nearly a quarter of the city. The Ringling Brothers blew into Florida, too. What is clear is that Florida has long been a place to which new people blow in, and sometimes blow back out: Spanish explorers, fanatical naturalists, escaped slaves, Confederate army deserters, outlaws, Cuban exiles, Caribbean refugees, tourists, and, of course, snow birds. Almost every aspect of its official and civil history is false.”
#FLORIDA MAN JUNE 6 1998 DRIVER#
“Chicanery is the economic and cognitive driver in modern Florida. By the 1920s there was such an excitement for property in the state that the New York Timesprinted a separate section dedicated to Florida real estate.
Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward took office after campaigning on a promise to “drain that abominable pestilence-ridden swamp,” by which he meant the Florida Everglades, and after the swamp began to dry, land in Florida started to sell.
This is a Florida filled with water, an Everglades of alligators, malaria, and bandits, a place called the “most dreary and pandemonium-like region I ever visited” by an army doctor sent to Florida to fight the Seminole Indians in 1838.īut around the turn of the century, the state changed. The first flag to fly about the statehouse read “Let Us Alone.” “I thought I saw an alligator catching a fish.įor most of the 1800s, Florida was considered unlivable by the rest of the country-and those who did call it home weren’t exactly inviting others down here to live. So, in the name of excess (with is also very Floridian), below is a list of Florida tidbits I had to excise from the Oxford American essay but have been unable to forget. I love Florida and writers who try to capture Florida and it also seemed like Florida was suddenly having a moment-or at least being noticed more than usual-and so I figured I could easily highlight the new and old from the state’s literary canon and be done with it.īut as the book critic Nick Moran once wrote, “Like a greased manatee, Florida eludes capture.”īy the end, I had written a 6,000-word essay about Florida that still managed to leave out so much: authors I wanted to mention, theories I hoped to include, Florida quotes I was dying to cite, memories I couldn’t give up.
I agreed to define and survey Florida literature, now and throughout the ages, for the Oxford American’s summer issue. Earlier this year, I took on a mammoth project that at the time totally felt manageable.
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