Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Arts
Florida has a well-earned reputation as a welcoming port for all manner of
kitsch and low-brow entertainment. She invented the theme park, spring
break,
Miami Vice
and her own absurdist, black-comic semitropical crime
noir. But there's so much more. Should we dismiss Florida's contributions to
high culture just because the colors are always sunshine bright? At their
best, Florida traditions are simultaneously homegrown and cosmopolitan,
and vibrate with the surreal, mercurial truths of everyday life in this alligator-
infested, hurricane-troubled peninsula.
You can count among Florida's snowbirds some of the USA's best writers, such as Robert
Frost, Stephen King, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Annie Dillard, and every January the US
literati holds court at the annual Key West Literary Seminar.
Literature
Beginning in the 1930s, Florida cleared its throat and developed its own bona fide literary
voice, courtesy mainly of three writers. The most famous was Ernest Hemingway, who
settled in Key West in 1928 to write, fish and drink, not necessarily in that order. 'Papa'
wrote
For Whom the Bell Tolls
and
A Farewell to Arms
here, but he only set one novel in
Florida,
To Have and Have Not
(1937), thus making his life more Floridian than his writ-
ing.
The honor of 'most Floridian writer' is generally bestowed on Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
who lived in Cross Creek between Gainesville and Ocala. She turned her sympathetic, keen
eye on Florida's pioneers - the Crackers who populated 'the invisible Florida' - and on the
elemental beauty of the state's swampy wilderness. Her novel
The Yearling
(1938) won the
Pulitzer Prize, and
Cross Creek
(1942) is a much-lauded autobiographical novel. Her ori-
ginal homestead is now a museum.
Rounding out the trio is Zora Neale Hurston, an African American writer who was born
in all-black Eatonville, near Orlando. Hurston became a major figure in New York's Harlem
Renaissance of the 1930s, and her most famous novel,
Their Eyes Were Watching God
