The Tropic of Cracker

James Hutchinson (Cover painting) Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xiv, [2], 240. Illustrations. Bibliography. Autographed sticker on the front of the DJ. Signed by the author on the title page. DJ has some damp signs on its inside. Book cover unaffected. Plastic DJ protector has some sticker residue near spine. This is one of The Florida History and Culture Series. Alvin Victor Burt (September 11, 1927 – November 29, 2008) an author and longtime journalist at The Miami Herald in Florida, was born Sept. 11, 1927, in Oglethorpe County, Georgia and grew up at the family home in Jacksonville, Florida. He served as a sports writer, news reporter, editor, editorial writer and columnist. Burt reported from Washington to Latin America and the Caribbean and throughout Florida. Before working with The Miami Herald he had positions with the Atlanta Journal and the Jacksonville Journal. He was seriously wounded by "friendly fire" while covering the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. For many years he wrote a back-page column for The Miami Herald Sunday magazine on interesting people and places around Florida that drew him quite a following. Floridian author David Nolan said he used to buy the Herald just to read Burt's column. Many of them were collected in book form as Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes (1984), Al Burt's Florida (1997), and Tropic of Cracker (1999). A scholar and advocate of the Florida cracker subculture, Burt was a longtime trustee of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society – an organization that celebrated the life and work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who gave the Crackers dignity in American literature. "The Tropic of Cracker will . . . end the debate once and for all, of whether the term "Cracker" is derogatory or a source of great pride. Al Burt has a masterpiece here."--Sandra Bogan, Florida Audubon Society. From the preface: "The Tropic of Cracker survives in myth, memory, and love of natural Florida. It exists more in the mind than in geography, more in the memory than in the sight, more in attitude than in the encounter. . . . This book tells you about one man's vision of a state struggling to remain true to itself. It mixes new essays with a span of earlier ones written during nearly a quarter century of roving the state as a columnist for the Miami Herald. All of them, in sum, help illuminate and explain the Tropic of Cracker."--Al Burt. The crack of the old-time cow hunter's whip gave the native Floridian a nickname, but Al Burt's Tropic of Cracker is a state of mind shared by those who love "what remains of the Florida that needed no blueprint or balance sheet for its creation, that was here before there was a can opener or a commercial or a real-estate agent." In his years of roving the state as a Miami Herald columnist, Al Burt mapped Florida's Tropic of Cracker, not with lines of latitude and longitude but with stories. The Crackers Burt tells of are men and women from Apalachicola to the Everglades, from Tallahassee to the Keys. They lived in the late 1800s, and they live today--along the Ocklawaha and in the floodplains of Lake Okeechobee. They were cow hunters, Conchs, and alligator men. They grew oranges, sugarcane, and muscadine grapes. They made moonshine. They drove mules, ate fried mullet, and told yarns in a Cracker creole about Florida's panthers, snakes, alligators, and hurricanes. There are luminaries among them--Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Virgil Hawkins, John DeGrove, Harry Crews--but mostly they are just regular folk who mark the borders of the elusive and magical Tropic of Cracker. For anyone who loves the old Florida and still has hope for the new one, Tropic of Cracker is the state's truest road map and Al Burt its most eloquent cartographer. Al Burt worked as a journalist for 45 years, the last 22 at the Miami Herald. The recipient of numerous journalism awards, he has been a freelance contributor to many magazines, including The Nation and Historic Preservation, and is the author of several books, among them Florida: A Place in the Sun (1974), Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes (1984), and Al Burt's Florida (UPF, 1997), which was awarded the 1998 Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Book Award. In his honor, the 1,000 Friends of Florida established the annual Al Burt Award for Florida journalism. Condition: Very good / Good.

Keywords: Raymond Arsenault, Gary Mormino, Florida, Cattle, Roundup, Pahokee, Ferryman, Conch, Kleagle, Catfishermen, Alligator, Hog-killing, Apalachicola, LeRoy Collins, John DeGrove

ISBN: 0813016959

[Book #84188]

Price: $150.00

See all items by