Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Marjory Stoneman Douglas became the nation's best link to a remarkable era in Florida history. The themes of her stories in this new collection resonate with interest for readers today. Whether the subject is hurricanes, cockfighting, real estate deals, struggling immigrants, or corruption in the Everglades, Douglas wrote about it with distinction - and usually first. Originally published in the Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of the short story, these nine works have never before been collected or available in one place. Kevin M. McCarthy offers an introduction to each story, explaining its significance, setting, unusual references, place in Douglas's works, and significance to the history of South Florida.

Born in Minnesota in 1890 and raised and educated in Massachusetts, Marjory Stoneman Douglas came to Florida in 1915 to work for her father, who had just started a newspaper called the Herald in a small town called Miami. In this "frontier" town, she recovered from a misjudged marriage, learned to write journalism and fiction and drama, took on the fight for feminism and racial justice and conservation long before those causes became popular, and embarked on a long and uncommonly successful voyage into self-understanding. Way before women did this sort of thing, she recognized her own need for solitude and independence, and built her own little house away from town in an area called Coconut Grove. She still lives there, as she has for over 40 years, with her books and cats and causes, emerging frequently to speak, still a powerful force in ecopolitics. Marjory Stoneman Douglas begins this story of her life by admitting that "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself" and ends it stating her belief that "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary." The voice that emerges in between is a voice from the past and a voice from the future, a voice of conviction and common sense with a sense of humor, a voice so many audiences have heard over the years—tough words in a genteel accent emerging from a tiny woman in a floppy hat—which has truly become the voice of the river.

Fleeing bullies and life with his stepfamily, Henry Bunks finds a secret hideaway that becomes his observation point for activities in the Florida Everglades, legal and otherwise.

Describes an incident in the life of John Parker, an ex-slave who became a successful businessman in Ripley, Ohio, and who repeatedly risked his life to help other slaves escape to freedom.

Before 1947, when Marjory Stoneman Douglas named the Everglades a “river of grass,” most people considered the area a worthless swamp. She brought the world’s attention to the need to preserve the Everglades. In the Afterword of this edition, Michael Grunwald gives an update of what has happened to the Everglades since then. Grunwald points out that in 1947 the government was in the midst of establishing the Everglades National Park and turning loose the Army Corps of Engineers to control floods—both of which seemed like saviors for the Glades. But neither turned out to be the answer. Working from the research he did for his book, The Swamp, Grunwald offers an account of what went wrong and the many attempts to fix it, beginning with Save Our Everglades, which Douglas declared was “not nearly enough.” Grunwald then lays out the intricacies (and inanities) of the more recent and ongoing CERP, the hugely expensive Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan.