Al Burt's Florida

Florida Trust for Historic Preservation Award

Florida Historical Society Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Book Award

A tour of twentieth-century Florida through the writing of a roving reporter

As a roving reporter for the Miami Herald from 1973 to 1995, Al Burt traveled all of Florida, studying it with the insight of a native and the detached eye of the foreign correspondent he had been. During those years, he observed connections with the state’s past and speculated about its future, and, while he was at it, took note of the human frailties and heroisms he witnessed every day. Al Burt’s Florida is like a family portrait, a loving but not uncritical view of a complex and fascinating state.

Burt’s portrait combines vignettes of notable Floridians—some famous at the time, like Ed Ball, but most better known locally—with those of the state’s many special places: Okeechobee in the teens and twenties, Miami Beach in the fifties (when dinner in Havana was only a $26 plane ride away), Wakulla Springs when it served as Johnny Weismuller’s Tarzan movie set, modern-day Tallahassee with its formality and grace.

Al Burt himself emerges from this landscape as the remarkable, engaging, and passionate Floridian he is. He takes us in hand, starting from his headquarters in the north Florida scrub, on a tour of the charm, substance, and fantasy of Florida, yesterday and today. And always, he dwells with greatest affection on the smaller places, the real places, the anchors of old Florida—and on those folks who do their best to preserve them. In the process he captures a sense of Florida as home.