Florida Authors

Two people with extensive careers documenting the history and culture of Florida will be in Brevard County this week discussing their new books.

On Friday, January 13, at 7:00 pm, author and archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich will discuss his new book “Handfuls of History: Stories about Florida’s Past” at the Library of Florida History, 435 Brevard Ave., Cocoa Village.

On Saturday, January 14, at 2:00 pm, author and folklorist Peggy A. Bulger will discuss her new book “Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science, 2201 Michigan Ave., Cocoa.

Dr. Jerald T. Milanich is Curator Emeritus of Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, and one of the most respected historical archaeologists in the state.

“The past is fun to think about and to learn about,” says Milanich. “I love to do both. I also enjoy writing about the past. When we study and consider history, and when we write about it, we are making the past new again, which, of course, leads to more history. Florida is a state with a history like no other. People have been living here for as many as 14,000 years, maybe more.”

In his new book, “Handfuls of History: Stories about Florida’s Past,” Milanich discusses pre-Columbian Florida, Colonial Period people and events, and the nineteenth century shipwreck of the steamship City of Vera Cruz.

Milanich explores the origins of archaeology in Florida with Clarence B. Moore, and offers advice to future archeologists. He may even stir up some controversy as he questions the authenticity of the Miami Circle.

“My goal is to make history something people will value, even though the events of the past certainly were not necessarily pleasant experiences for those who lived them,” says Milanich. “If there is one thing that history tells us, it is that greed, fear, ignorance, and the quest for power have contributed to the demise of people and societies. Maybe the past is not all that different from the present. But by understanding the past perhaps we can enjoy a better future.”

Dr. Peggy Bulger was the state’s first folklorist, serving as Folk Arts Coordinator in 1976. From 1976 to 1989 she held senior folklore positions at the Florida Folklife Program, and created the Florida Folklife Collection. Bulger served as Folk Arts Director and Senior Program Officer for the Southern Arts Federation in Atlanta from 1989 to 1999, when she then became Director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Since 2011, she has been back in Florida, working with other folklorists throughout the state.

Bulger has been gathering material for her book “Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy” for forty years.

“I started really delving into materials that were done during the WPA,” says Bulger. “Stetson Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, all of them were folklorists who had worked in Florida back in the ‘30s and ‘40s. I was 25-years-old in 1976, and I thought that anyone who had lived in the 1930s and ‘40s was dead, because that was ancient history.”

Bulger was shocked and pleased to discover that Stetson Kennedy was alive and well and living in Jacksonville.

“I went to see Stetson and I started interviewing him about the WPA and the work that he had done here in Florida,” Bulger says. “Over the course of the years, we became fast friends, from ’76 to when he died in 2011. He really informed the work that I did in Florida.”

Stetson Kennedy was born in Jacksonville on October 5, 1916. From 1937 to 1942, he traveled the cities, towns, and rural backwoods of Florida documenting the cultural heritage of the state’s diverse populations. Using the name John Perkins, Kennedy later infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, exposing their secrets. He was an activist for positive social change, working to make life better for Floridians until his death on August 27, 2011.

Bulger’s talk is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Stetson Kennedy’s Multicultural Florida” at the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science.

The presentations of both Milanich and Bulger are free and open to the public.

A visit to the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park in the rural community of Cross Creek is like a trip back in time to the 1930s. The home there is furnished just as Rawlings had it when she was writing her Pulitzer Prize winning novel “The Yearling,” her autobiography “Cross Creek,” and other works depicting the lives of Florida Crackers.

Rawlings’s typewriter and notes sit on a table on the front porch, along with her ashtray and a pack of Lucky Strikes cigarettes, as if the writer has just gotten up to get a glass of iced tea from the kitchen.

Each room of the house contains furniture and personal items that belonged to Rawlings or are very similar to what the beloved Florida writer owned.

“She always described it as a rambling farmhouse,” says Carrie Todd, Park Ranger at Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. “Maybe a little shabby chic is the way to talk about it. It’s white with green lattice on the bottom. It’s 3,000 square feet, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, so it’s large, but it doesn’t seem large. It seems just sort of rambling when you’re trying to go through it.”

Although famous for her stories about rural life in Florida, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was not a native. She was born in Washington, D.C., and attended college at the University of Wisconsin Madison, graduating in 1918. She lived in Louisville, Kentucky and Rochester, New York before moving to Florida with her husband Charles Rawlings in 1928.

The couple planned to support themselves with the orange trees on their property, allowing them to write in a beautiful, serene, rural setting.

“They were both writers,” says Todd. “They both were going to write novels and they thought it was going to be an easy time to make money with that citrus crop.”

Growing citrus was a lot more work than the couple had anticipated. Charles Rawlings grew tired of life in the country, and the two were divorced. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings felt a connection to her Florida land, and stayed there to write.

“Marjorie walked through the rusty old gate and immediately fell in love,” Todd says. “The book ‘Cross Creek’ she often describes as a love story to a place. But Charles Rawlings had a completely different idea about what this was going to be. He thought he was going to be a gentleman farmer. Where Marjorie saw rustic charm, he saw the lack of paint, and the lack of screens, and the lack of electricity, and the lack of running water. He hadn’t been as successful as a writer, so when Marjorie hit it big, he maybe was a little jealous.”

Rawlings first attempted to write Gothic romance novels, but could not interest publishers in her work. Literary editor Maxwell Perkins was fascinated with Rawlings’s letters and stories about her life in rural Florida, and encouraged her to write a novel about that.

“Maxwell Perkins knew that Marjorie was onto something, that she had this really great talent” says Todd. “He got her to take the notes and the little bits she had been writing down ever since she first stepped into Florida, and turn it into a book. ‘The Yearling’ particularly, but she has eight novels and 26 short stories about Florida, so she had a lot of material to work with.”

Rawlings’s most popular book, “The Yearling,” won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1939, and was made into a very successful film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman in 1946. Her 1942 autobiography “Cross Creek” was adapted for a 1983 film starring Mary Steenburgen.

Not everyone was pleased with Rawlings’s work. Zelma Cason, a Cross Creek resident who was described by Rawlings in unflattering terms, sued the writer for invasion of privacy, eventually winning one dollar in damages.

In 1941, Rawlings married Norton Baskin, living in both the St. Augustine area and Cross Creek.

“He operated the Castle Warden Hotel, it’s now the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum,” says Todd. “She did live in St. Augustine with him most of the time, but came back to Cross Creek to write. She could only write here. This was really her place of inspiration.”

Patrick D. Smith’s 1984 novel “A Land Remembered” is one of the most popular books about Florida ever written.

The beloved Merritt Island author was born October 8, 1927, and died January 26, 2014. He would have been 88 this week.

Most popular novels have a year or so of commercial success, perhaps getting another boost when a paperback version comes out. Smith’s “A Land Remembered” has been a bestseller in Florida since it was first published.

“You know, that’s hard to understand sometimes,” said Smith. “Every year it gets more and more readers. It’s really gaining with young readers. Most of the schools in Florida now teach it. The young kids really like it, because they had no idea that Florida was ever like it’s depicted in ‘A Land Remembered.’”

It’s not just young readers who love “A Land Remembered.” Many lifelong Floridians say that if you are only going to read one book about the history and culture of the state, then this novel should be it.

The novel “A Land Remembered” follows the fictional MacIvey family for more than a century, from their arrival in Florida in 1858 through 1968. The family struggles at first to live off the land, but becomes very successful in the cattle industry. The last generation covered in the book loses connection with the land, selling it off for development.

“The last of the MacIveys, Sol, is the one who built all those structures and came to regret it,” said Smith. “Before he died, he gave a lot of the land to the state to be preserved forever as wildlife preserve. So, he regretted what he had done.”

In the novel, pioneer life is difficult for the MacIveys as they face hurricanes, freezes, and mosquitos capable of killing cattle. They have conflicts with cattle rustlers and Confederate deserters, but develop friendships with Native Americans and African Americans who are also struggling to survive in the Florida wilderness.

“I wanted to make that family real, to show what they really went through,” said Smith. “Not just telling readers there was a Great Freeze in 1895, but showing how that affected this family, and how they were affected by the coming of the railroads, and the birth of the cattle industry and the Civil War. Later on, how they were affected by the great land boom down in Miami in the 1920s, and that hurricane that hit Lake Okeechobee in 1928 and killed over 2,000 people. These are all things that really happened in Florida, but the really important thing to me was to show how they affected people.”

No one family experienced everything that the MacIveys did, but almost everything in the book did happen to one pioneer family or another.

“That book is not based on one family,” Smith said. “The characters are composites of different families. I’ve had at least a dozen families in this state swear to me that the book is about their family because they identify with it.”

“A Land Remembered” was recognized by the Florida Historical Society when it was first published, earning the Charlton Tebeau Award for Best Novel based on Florida history.

In 2012, Patrick Smith won the State of Florida’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing.

Smith had success with other books including “The River is Home,” “Allapattah,” and “The Beginning.” His novel “Angel City” was made into a film starring Paul Winfield, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Ralph Waite.

“It’s seven novels all together,” said Smith. “Only one of them was really as popular as ‘A Land Remembered.’ That was ‘Forever Island.’ It’s been published all over the world. There’s not too many writers left in Florida who’ve been at it as long as I have. My first novel, ‘The River is Home’ was published in 1953. I’ve written a total of ten books. I know that’s not a lot of books, but you know, I did it at the same time I held down a full time job, and that makes a lot of difference.”

Smith was placed in the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 1999 to commemorate his full body of work, but he will always be best remembered for “A Land Remembered.”
 

Local author William Culyer Hall is known for his dark but engaging stories about rural life in Florida. His new novel “Florida Boy” continues that tradition.

“Florida Boy” is a prequel to Hall’s 2010 novel “The Trouble With Panthers,” winner of the Florida Book Award for Best Popular Fiction and the Patrick D. Smith Award for Best Novel.

Both books focus on the fictional Rawlerson family, pioneers in Florida’s cattle industry.

Hall was inspired and influenced by Brevard County author Patrick D. Smith, author of the beloved Florida pioneer saga “A Land Remembered,” the story of the fictional MacIvey family. Before his death on January 26, 2014, Smith helped Hall with his work.

“The first book that I wrote, Pat was gracious enough to read the manuscript for me,” Hall says. “He told me it wasn’t that good, but he said ‘I see promise.’ I rewrote it, gave it back to him, and he loved it, and wound up getting it published.”

That first book, “September’s Fawn,” is a tragic story set in a north Florida swamp and nearby Cross City.

Hall’s second novel, “The Trouble With Panthers,” introduces the Rawlerson family in the early twenty-first century. After raising cattle on the same land for a century, the family is divided about how to move forward as property values rise. The conflict forces the sale of the property.

“The principal character in that story was 18-year-old Bodie Rawlerson, and of course he didn’t like what had happened,” says Hall. “He wanted to raise cattle like his father and his father before him. It turned out to be a tragedy as has happened with a lot of real families in central Florida.”

The death of elderly family patriarch July Rawlerson sets the stage for the end of an era in “The Trouble With Panthers.” That same character is born in “Florida Boy,” as the family first establishes their homestead in south-central Florida.

In the late nineteenth century, James Arthur Rawlerson works for other cattlemen in Osceola County, but dreams of owning his own property. He and his wife move to the Fort Pierce area to start a family. They are still renting land, but they establish their own herd of cattle.

“The firstborn, John Morgan Rawlerson is the protagonist in this story,” says Hall. “The story begins when he’s about 14. Even though his father will never realize the dream of owning property, John Morgan is determined that they will.”

Since “Florida Boy” is a prequel to “The Trouble With Panthers,” it’s not giving too much away to say that John Morgan Rawlerson is successful in establishing a family homestead, despite some major obstacles.

There are vivid descriptions in “Florida Boy” of what life was like for late nineteenth and early twentieth century pioneers in Florida, and the challenges they faced.

Imagine living in Florida with no air conditioning, no running water except for a pitcher pump, and no electricity. The automobile was a new invention at the time that “Florida Boy” is set.

“Times were tough and the people had to be tough or they wouldn’t make it,” says Hall. “They pretty much had to do everything for themselves. They very rarely would go into Fort Pierce to buy provisions, and only the staples. Everything else they either raised it or hunted it, and they did a lot of fishing.”

There is a lot of death in “Florida Boy,” from disease, accidents, and the actions of other people. Hall shows that pioneer Florida in the early 1900s was every bit as wild as the Wild West.

“I didn’t want my protagonist to come across as being a bad guy, but there were situations where he had to do things he didn’t want to do,” says Hall.

With the birth of July Rawlerson near the end of one novel and his death in another, the topic of Hall’s next book seems clear.

“There are plenty of historic events that will take place from the end of ‘Florida Boy’ to ‘The Trouble With Panthers’ where I could write a good story,” says Hall. “July lived a long life. He was almost 94 when he died, so there’s a lot of writing there.”

With the publication of her novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe became the most famous writer in America. That book helped to fuel the raging debate over slavery in the United States.

When Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he reportedly said, “So you are the little lady who started this Great War.”

Often overlooked is the fact that Harriet Beecher Stowe is also one of the first and greatest proponents of Florida as a popular tourist destination.

Stowe began spending her winters in Mandarin, Florida, shortly after the Civil War ended. Her home was on the St. Johns River where she could sit on her porch and enjoy the natural environment. Stowe also traveled to places such as Silver Springs, St. Augustine, and Tallahassee, and wrote about her experiences.

In 1873, some of Stowe’s descriptive and colorful “tourist articles” were published in the book “Palmetto Leaves.” More recently, a collection of Stowe’s fascinating vignettes of Florida life not included in “Palmetto Leaves” has been published as the book “Calling Yankees to Florida: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Forgotten Tourist Articles.”

“She was writing about what life was like here in frontier Florida, and she would publish those into periodicals up North,” says Sandy Arpen, president of the Mandarin Museum and Historical Society.

“She especially loved the nature here. She talked about the smell of the orange groves and of the orange blossoms, and of the moss hanging from the trees, and the beauty of the roses, and the live oaks, and all of the things that were so beautiful here. Many people became interested in touring here and coming to see what she was writing about because she was very well read in the North.”

Stowe became actively involved in Florida’s new tourism industry of the late 1800s. The steamship companies that brought tourists down the river paid the famous writer to stand on her porch and wave to their passengers.

Stowe’s book “Palmetto Leaves” consists of a series of articles written in the year 1872. She wrote many articles both before and after that year, and a selection of those articles has been assembled in the book “Calling Yankees to Florida,” edited by John T. Foster Jr. and Sarah Whitmer Foster.

The Foster’s believe that Stowe had a hidden agenda in writing about the natural wonders of Florida for northerners suffering through snowy winters. In addition to stimulating tourism, the Foster’s think that Stowe was trying to attract a more progressive voting block to Florida to lead the state from the Old South into a new era.

Following the Civil War, there were almost as many African Americans living in Florida as there were Caucasians.

“Florida is about half black and half white, and it wouldn’t take many newcomers to Florida to become a place different from what it had been in the past,” says John T. Foster Jr.

“The white population of Florida at the time was divided into different groups in terms of social origin,” says Foster. “The oldest group in Florida would have been the Menorcans, associated with the seafood industry and primarily St. Augustine. A different group would have been ‘cracker’ Florida. These are frontier and country people drifting in from Georgia primarily. This, of course, would be a main theme of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ famous novels. Lastly, there would be ‘planter’ Florida in the region east and west of Tallahassee. These were people replicating the Old South in terms of slavery.”

Foster says that Stowe and her forward thinking associates in Florida realized that if a new population of northern whites would move to the state, progressive attitudes could prevail here.

Stowe’s friends in Florida included Governor Harrison Reed and his wife Chloe Merrick Reed. The governor modernized Florida’s education system and appointed Stowe’s brother Charles Beecher as State Superintendent of Education. Both Mrs. Reed and another friend of Stowe’s, John Swain, were active abolitionists in Florida.

Rather than aggressively promoting her political views, Stowe chose a more subtle approach to modernizing Florida. She helped to stimulate a growing tourism industry, and attracted progressive voters to the state by extolling the virtues of life in the sunshine surrounded by natural beauty.

Ernest Hemingway, born in 1899, published his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, in 1926. He was living in Paris with the first of his four wives, Hadley Richardson. Hemingway divorced Richardson the following year.

Writer John Dos Passos suggested to Hemingway that he might enjoy Key West, Florida, and in March 1928, Hemingway visited the island for the first time.

“He fell in love with Key West, the lifestyle, the fishing, of course,” says Dave Gonzales, director at the Ernest Hemingway House and Museum. “He kept coming back to Key West over the next two years. He’d invite his friends from the ‘Lost Generation.’ John Dos Passos came down, (artist) Waldo Peirce, (writer) F. Scott Fitzgerald, and they’d come down for fishing trips in the spring mostly, but Hemingway would spend four to six months out of the next two years here.”

When Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, found the home that the couple would move in to, it was boarded up and abandoned, but she could see it’s potential. The property was on the highest point in Key West, across the street from the island’s lighthouse.

“They bought this home in 1931, for $8,000 in back taxes, and still today, it’s the largest residential piece of property on this island,” says Gonzales. “We’re a full acre with very lush tropical gardens. The mansion was originally built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a wealthy shipwreck and salvaging merchant.”

Ernest Hemingway lived in the home until 1939. He was very productive while is Key West. As early as his first visit in 1928, the writer put the finishing touches on his book A Farewell to Arms. While living in the home that is now the Hemingway Museum, the author wrote the novel To Have and Have Not, the nonfiction book Green Hills of Africa, and short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

The Ernest Hemingway House and Museum property is famous for its population of polydactyl, or six-toed cats. The cats at the museum today are “living history” in a sense, as they are direct descendants of Hemingway’s own cats.

The six-toed cats were preferred by the captains of wooden clipper ships, as the extra digit was thought to aid in the capture of rodents. “They also were believed to have mystical and magical powers,” says Gonzales. “They were believed to give ship’s captains calm seas, prevailing winds, safe passages on their journeys.”

Hemingway was inspired by the folklore legend to begin collecting the polydactyl cats. A photo in the dining room of the Hemingway House and Museum shows the writer’s sons Gregory and Patrick holding Snowball, the first of the family’s six-toed cats.

About 50 cats lived on the property while Hemingway lived there, and the same number is maintained at the museum today.

In 1937, while Hemingway was away covering the Spanish American War, Pauline decided to install what was the largest residential pool in south Florida. The pool cost $20,000, when the entire estate had been purchased for $8,000.

Hemingway was so angry about the cost of the pool that he threw a penny at Pauline, telling her that she might as well take his last cent.

“She picked up the penny, and imbedded it into the wet cement where it still remains today,” says Gonzales. “It’s a 1934 D copper penny and the last pocket it was in was Ernest Hemingway’s.”

In addition to being appreciated for his concise and direct writing style, Hemingway was known for his fondness for drinking to excess. His favorite bar was Sloppy Joes. The urinal from the original Sloppy Joe’s Bar is in the yard at the Ernest Hemingway House and Museum.

After a night of drinking, Hemingway and “Sloppy Joe” Russell hand carried the urinal to Hemingway’s home. They placed it next to Pauline’s pool, where it still serves as the water bowl for the family’s cats.

In 1939 Hemingway moved from Key West to Cuba, leaving his second wife and children behind. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of his novel The Old Man and the Sea. The author committed suicide in 1961 at his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.

Before the Hippie Movement of the 1960s promoted expanded consciousness, sexual freedom, and a widespread questioning of authority in American popular culture, the Beat Generation of the 1950s led a counterculture movement of their own.

The term “Beat Generation” brings to mind the City Lights Bookstore and Vesuvio Café in San Francisco, or poetry readings at smoky jazz clubs in New York, but it was in Florida that the leading writer of the movement, the man who coined that phrase, did some of his most important work.

Jack Kerouac is considered to be one of the most significant and influential writers of his generation. He was a primary figure of the Beat movement along with poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac was living in Orlando when he found out that his seminal novel “On the Road” was going to be published. The semi-autobiographical work follows narrator Sal Paradise as he travels across the country and into Mexico with Dean Moriarty and other friends as they indulge in drinking, drugs, and sex while being inspired by jazz music and the possibilities of adventure while traveling into the unknown.

“Florida played a crucial role in Jack Kerouac’s career, especially because it represents his transformation from this 35-year-old nomadic nobody, this shy writer from Lowell, Massachusetts, to literally, the bard of the Beat Generation,” says Bob Kealing, broadcast journalist and author of the book “Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends.”

“He made his last edits to ‘On the Road’ here in College Park, in northwest Orlando. He also wrote his follow-up ‘The Dharma Bums’ here in the Historic Kerouac House, and his last prolific period was here in Orlando in 1957 and into 1958. He wrote dozens of letters and poems and he was finally seeing success, and it really energized him,” says Kealing.

Today, the Orlando home where Kerouac was most prolific is designated as an historic landmark, and functions as a temporary residence for aspiring writers.

In the late 1990s, Kealing discovered that Kerouac had lived in the 1926 cottage at 1418 Clouser Avenue in Orlando. After leading the effort to save and refurbish the house, Kealing helped to establish the not-for-profit Kerouac Project in the fall of 2000, to provide three month residencies for promising writers. The writers-in-residence live rent free and are provided a stipend for food, so they can focus on their work.

The Beat Generation writers are recognized as leaders of an American counterculture movement and influential precursors to the Hippies, but their work has not been universally embraced. Truman Capote famously criticized Kerouac’s free form style of writing, saying, “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”

Bob Kealing points out that following World War II, the United States entered a period of prosperity characterized by a proliferation of prefabricated suburban communities. Soldiers returning from the war started families in these new neighborhoods, establishing a conventional, modern, “normal,” American existence.

The Beat Generation was looking for something different.

“There was a certain class of literary types, including Kerouac, including Ginsberg, who were looking for another path, if you will, a creative path. The Beats really freed up Post-World War II America to pursue non-traditional lifestyles, for better or worse, to celebrate the search for one’s own road,” says Kealing.

Kerouac’s own search for fulfillment led down a rocky road. With the exception of his mother and last wife Stella, Kerouac’s alcoholism strained most of his personal relationships to the point of breaking. He had hoped to build a communal home in Orlando to include his sister Caroline and her family, but that never happened. Caroline died in 1964 and is buried in Orlando’s Greenwood Cemetery.

Jack Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of 47, in St. Petersburg, Florida, but his work lives on.

“Kerouac’s work, especially ‘On the Road,’ really is a love letter to the West, and to finding one’s own road out there,” says Kealing. “I think that’s why it resonates so much in the United States, but also around the world, because of this Romantic notion of travel and wanderlust, and seeing what’s out there. I think that’s why the Beats continue to strike a chord even around the world today.”

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.

One of the first Florida novels ever written remained unpublished for more than 150 years. For nearly five decades, the hand written manuscript was preserved but forgotten in an archive at Rollins College.

Wenxian Zhang is head of Archives and Special Collections at Rollins College in Winter Park. While doing an inventory of the Florida Collection in 2004, Zhang came across a hand written manuscript by the unpublished author Cyrus Parkhurst Condit.

“The manuscript was a gift to Rollins from Frederick Dau, author of the 1934 book Florida Old and New,” says Zhang. Dau donated the Condit manuscript and many other items to Rollins in 1955.

When Zhang rediscovered the Condit manuscript, he shared it with Maurice O’Sullivan, Professor of Literature at Rollins and a recognized authority on Florida literature. “I brought it to his attention, he being a literary expert,” Zhang says. “We feel that we found something significant.”

O’Sullivan instantly recognized the importance of the find. Written in 1855, the book was one of only a dozen novels set in Florida, which had been named a state just ten years before.

“Probably the most significant element of the book is that it’s the first novel that I would call a domestic novel about Florida,” says O’Sullivan. Unlike most other novels about Florida, this was not an idealized vision of the state written from afar, but the work of a man who had actually visited here, hunting, fishing, and participating in the daily lives of residents.

Little is known about Condit, except that he came from a wealthy New Jersey family. “He was apparently 25-years-old when he visited Florida in 1855,” O’Sullivan says. “At the end of that year he got married, had two children, and then died at 31.”

Condit never had the opportunity to finish revising his novel or get it published.

O’Sullivan and Zhang have turned the hand written manuscript into the book A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport: The Lost 1855 Novel of Cyrus Parkhurst Condit, providing an introduction and afterword.

With the help of student assistants, O’Sullivan and Zhang scanned the hand written manuscript into an electronic format, transcribed the text, and carefully edited the work. “That’s one of the great advantages to working at an academic institution,” says Zhang. “You have eager students who are willing to help you.”

A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport: The Lost Novel of Cyrus Parkhurst Condit is a coming of age story that contains detailed descriptions of everyday life in Florida in the years prior to the Civil War.

“17-year-old George Morton comes to Florida suffering from ill health and psychological problems and emotional problems because of his father’s death,” O’Sullivan says. “He recovers by entering into nature.”

During his trip, George Morton travels around north and central Florida hunting and fishing. He visits a lumber camp, talks with a survivor of the Seminole Indian War, goes to a wedding, and learns about the importance of Florida’s cattle industry.

By the time George leaves Florida, he is a healthy and confident young man.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s 1938 novel The Yearling is one of the most popular Florida novels ever written. In the book a teenage boy learns to hunt, listens to hunting stories, visits Silver Glen Springs and other central Florida towns, builds a fence, and takes a fawn as a pet.

A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport was written more than 80 years before The Yearling, and the plot similarities are striking.

It is possible that Rawlings had access to Condit’s manuscript through historian A.J. Hanna at Rollins College, who was good friends with both Rawlings and Frederick Dau.

“I suspect, however, that the similarity really has more to do with the fact that life was pretty simple in the 1850s, was pretty simple even in the 1930s,” O’Sullivan says. “Most of what happened (in both novels) was probably the average, everyday life of folks until World War II, until the enormous growth of Florida began changing our lives entirely.”

Thanks to O’Sullivan and Zhang, A Trip to Florida for Health and Sport: The Lost 1855 Novel of Cyrus Parkhurst Condit joins the pantheon of important Florida literature.

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

No, this is not a quote from Ernest Hemingway. That aphorism is from late 18^th and early 19^th century English cleric Charles Caleb Colton, but it does reflect the spirit of the Hemingway Days celebration.

For the past week, the 34^th Annual Hemingway Days Festival has been held in Key West, with a “Hemingway in Key West” exhibit at the Custom House Museum, a Marlin Fishing Tournament, an evening of readings and presentations by local authors, a Caribbean Street Fair, an arm wrestling championship, a unique “bull run,” and other events.

The winners of the Hemingway Short Story Competition are announced, and more than $120,000 is raised for nursing, poetry, and journalism scholarships in memory of writer Ernest Hemingway.

The focal point of the annual celebration is the Sloppy Joe’s “Papa” Hemingway Look-Alike Contest. Prior to the festivities, dozens of finalists are selected from hundreds of applicants, nearly all of whom have white hair and matching beards. Through a series of eliminations before rowdy crowds at Hemingway’s old watering hole, Sloppy Joe’s, a single winner is selected.

Melbourne resident Dave Wallace, who says he has always admired Hemingway, was one of the selected finalists this year. “I’ve met several people from New Orleans, from Pennsylvania, from New York, Ohio, and one from Palm Bay. When I tell people I’m from Melbourne they say ‘Australia?’ Apparently there are people who have traveled from all over the world to be here.”

While this year’s competition is the first for Dave Wallace, Melbourne resident Hank Wielgosz has been participating in the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest for 21 years and has been a finalist 11 times. This year was the first time Wielgosz moved forward in the competition beyond the first round of eliminations, and he was presented with a special recognition, the Jean “John” Klausing Memorial Award, named for the late owner of Sloppy Joe’s.

“The John Klausing Award means more,” than the contest Wielgosz says, “because it came from the original manager’s wife and that’s a great connection. We’ve met a lot of the folks who work here and we’ve had a great time with all of them.”

Known for his concise and direct writing style, Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of his novel “The Old Man and the Sea.” After completing his service as an ambulance driver in World War I, Hemingway worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris. His first novel “The Sun Also Rises” was published in 1926, when Hemingway was 27. In 1927, Hemingway divorced his first wife Hadley Richardson, and married Pauline Pfieffer.

Ernest Hemingway first came to Key West in 1928, and returned several times over the next couple of years, primarily for fishing trips that would sometimes last months. He would bring other writers with him on these trips, including John Dos Passos and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

In 1931, Hemingway and his wife Pauline bought what is still the largest residential property on the island, where they lived together until 1939. Dave Gonzales, Events Coordinator for the Hemingway House and Museum, says that Hemingway was more productive in Key West than anywhere else.

“This was his first writing studio, the secondary building in the rear of the main mansion. Prior to this time he wrote on table tops, bar counter tops, kitchen tops, coffee tables, wherever he could find a smooth surface to write.”

While living in Key West, Hemingway wrote the novel “To Have and Have Not,” the non-fiction book “Green Hills of Africa,” and the short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.”

Most of the participants in the Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest are not that concerned about who actually wins.

“They say that for us 45 first timers, it’s difficult to win your first time,” says Dave Wallace. Contest veteran Hank Wielgosz says, “It’s like a club. This is the only time we see a lot of these people and they’re all interesting guys,” adding that “it’s just fun participating.”

As Ernest Hemingway said, “When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.”

Dr. Ben Brotemarkle is executive director of the Florida Historical Society and host of the radio program “Florida Frontiers,” broadcast locally on 90.7 WMFE Thursday evenings at 6:30 and Sunday afternoons at 4:00, and on 89.5 WFIT Sunday mornings at 7:00. The show can be heard online at myfloridahistory.org.

As innocent four-year-old girls in the late 1940s, Katie, who is white, and Delia, an African-American, become best friends despite societal pressures against them. In 1960, when the girls are 16, Kate abandons her childhood friend when she is needed most. In 2006, Kate is working to earn Delia’s forgiveness as danger surrounds the women’s reunion.

That’s the premise of the new novel “Reparation” by Titusville author Ruth Rodgers. Although the exciting and suspenseful book is not based on specific actual events, it does reflect reality in Florida from the 1940s to the present.

Ruth Rodgers is a native Floridian, raised on a farm in Madison County. She grew up in rural north Florida in the 1950s and ‘60s, when schools, theaters, restaurants, and other public accommodations were racially segregated. Rodgers says that black families and white families worked side by side in the tobacco fields, but that’s where the interaction ended.

“We worked with black people, but we never socialized with them,” Rodgers says. “It was very much frowned upon.”

The novel “Reparation” is written from the first-person perspective of Kate as she flashes back through her childhood relationship with Delia. The reader sees Kate’s convictions about racial equality strengthen over time. Rodgers is the same age as her main character Kate, and shares other traits with her. Both believed in racial equality, but were not outspoken about their views in the 1960s.

“They were not popular views at that time,” Rodgers says. “I think, looking back, a lot of liberal Southerners feel a sense of guilt that we didn’t do more, that we kept our views to ourselves, and that we let culture dictate to us how to behave.”

The novel “Reparation” has a warning label on the cover informing readers that the offensive and racially charged “n-word” appears in the book. Use of the word is particularly jarring to modern readers when it comes from four-year-old Katie near the beginning of the story. While presented in an historically accurate context, its use may be too shocking for sensitive readers.

“She wouldn’t have had any other word to use,” Rodgers explains. “This was the word that her parents used, her grandparents used, her neighbors used, everybody around her used. It was very common in the area in which I grew up. To her it’s just a descriptive term. It’s not a derogatory term, because she has no other word to replace it with.”

“Reparation” was being prepared for publication just as discussions about race relations in Florida and the nation were reigniting. As design of the book was nearing completion in 2013, President Obama spoke about frustration over the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case; the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act, and celebrity chef Paula Deen’s career was damaged by her admitted use of the “n-word.” Speakers at the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington encouraged people to be diligent about protecting the legacy of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.

Rodgers says that a need exists for continued discussion about the history of race relations in Florida and the nation. She believes that her novel “Reparation” can serve as a catalyst for such conversations. “We’ve come a long way since the 1940s,” Rodgers says, “but we still have a long way to go.”

The story of Katie and Delia demonstrates that racism and bigotry are learned behaviors that can be overcome, even when they are instilled in children at a very young age and supported by prevailing societal attitudes.

Beyond providing a particular perspective on racial attitudes in Florida and how they evolved in the last half of the twentieth century, this novel also offers a well written and suspenseful story.