|
 |
Florida Book Awards
Get to know some of Florida’s best writers and read excerpts of their work in our magazines featuring the annual Florida Book Awards:
• 2011
• 2010
• 2009
• 2008
• 2007
We asked the recipients of the 2011 Florida Book Awards two questions:
What other writer has most strongly influenced you as a writer?
How do you discover your inner voice—that genuine self that you strive to express?
Read excerpts from their answers.
Carl Hiaasen—journalist, columnist, and novelist—won the 2011 Florida Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing.
|
Welcome to the Book Nook, a place to read about Florida books. Check back for new features every month or so. This time, take a look below at an annotated list of books written by Stetson Kennedy, the icon of Florida history and culture who died in August 2011. He is featured in our current FORUM magazine. Also: Read the insightful article, “Stetson Kennedy and the Pursuit of Truth,” by Paul Ortiz, history professor and director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.
BOOKS BY STETSON KENNEDY
Palmetto Country, 1942-A colorful social history of a Florida that few have experienced, this book was a volume in the American Folkways Series edited by Erskine Caldwell. Here's what Kennedy's friend Woody Guthrie said about it: "I don't know of a book on my whole shelf that hits me any harder than your Palmetto Country. It gives me a better trip and taste and look and feel for Florida than I got in the forty-seven states I've actually been in body and tramped in boot..."
Southern Exposure, 1946-Kennedy describes the immediate post-World War II South, delving into racism and what he termed an almost "feudal" system that delayed the region's emergence as a modern entity.
I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan, 1954 (republished as The Klan Unmasked, 1990)-Kennedy tells the story of his post-World War II years as an undercover agent in the Ku Klux Klan-in which he actually attained a rank within the Klan system. Kennedy describes his efforts to protect people from being tortured, intimidated, and murdered.
Passage to Violence, 1954-This is a fictional account of Kennedy's infiltration of the Klan. It is subtitled "A Shocking Account of Naked Terror," and a publisher calls it "one of the strangest adventures of our time, the story of one man's savage fight against the treachery and intrigue of a monstrous evil."
Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A, 1956-This book documents the legally imposed system of separating blacks and whites that prevailed during what Kennedy calls "the long century from Emancipation to the Overcoming." It was first published in Paris in 1956 by Jean-Paul Sartre and subsequently issued in many languages around the world. Kennedy said that American publishers would not touch the manuscript while Jim Crow laws were in effect.
South Florida Folklife (written with folklorists Peggy Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas), 1994-The authors describe a mosaic of contrasts in this vibrant part of Florida, presenting it as a microcosm of the United States with its extravagant wealth and heartbreaking poverty, constant evolution and solid tradition, tropical peace and devastating storms, settled generations and the newest Americans.
After Appomattox: How the South Won the War, 1995-Kennedy contends that a determined southern oligarchy wrenched political and cultural victory out of the military defeat in the Civil War. His premise is that the Southern surrender was reversed during Reconstruction.
Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West, 2008-Kennedy offers a cornucopia of street scenes, paintings, art, music, and anecdotes that provide a colorful trip through Key West as it once was.
The Florida Slave, 2011-This book includes numerous accounts by ex-slaves who were emancipated during the Civil War. Their accounts were recorded in interviews conducted by the WPA writers' project of the 1930s and as testimony during the 1871 joint congressional committee hearings in Jacksonville.
|