From Native Americans to Americans
The arrival of Juan Ponce de León and his crew on the peninsula has been the subject of numerous chronicles, such as those of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés(Historia General y Natural de las Indias, 1535) or Francisco López de Gómara(Historia General de las Indias, 1551). The story is accurate when it states that the name given to this new land was a reference to Easter(Pascal Florida in Spanish) celebrated on April 2, 1513, hiccups a bit on the exact place of landing, St. Augustine or perhaps Melbourne Beach, and is facetious when it suggests that Ponce de León was looking for the Fountain of Youth. However, this legend was taken up in the Memoirs of a man who lived an extraordinary adventure: Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who was only 13 years old in the year 1549, when the ship on which he was sailing to Spain ran aground off Florida. Rescued in extremis by the Calusas Indians with some of his comrades, he was the only one to be spared, because perhaps the only one to follow the traditions of his hosts. In his autobiography, written in 1575, he not only recounted the 17 years he spent with them, but also provided invaluable information on the way of life of a people who did not have a writing system that allowed them to leave traces of their culture, and who were doomed to die out within the next two centuries.. The cartographer Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, a native of Dieppe where he was born in 1533, also gave a valuable account of his encounter with the Amerindians, and also described the landscapes he had observed while participating in the catastrophic colonization attempt orchestrated by Jean Ribault and René de Goulaine de Laudonnière in 1562. If his account(Brevis narratio eorum quae in Florida Americae provincia Gallis acciderunt published post-mortem in 1591) proves difficult to find in French, that it is said that his illustrations were destroyed and that the engravings that have come down to us are the work of Theodore de Bry, it remains to discover his destiny in comic book form thanks to the talent of Jean Dytar(Florida, editions Delcourt, 2018).
Far from the violence of colonization, nature lovers will be able to rejoice that the work of William Bartram (1739-1823), the first naturalist to be born on the American continent, available in a beautiful illustrated edition in color at José Corti. These Travels (1791), elegant in form as well as in content, inspired writers who detected in these descriptions - here of an immense virgin expanse, there of a soft turtle with spines - a pervasive romanticism. It is even said that Chateaubriand, in his novel Atala (1801), took up long passages by transposing them from Florida to Louisiana, without bothering to mention his source. More subtle, the two English poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth paid homage to the one who never ceased to count, to draw, to praise the fauna and the flora, the one who had in common with another visitor - Jean-Jacques Audubon - a great passion for the birds. The famous ornithologist, born in Haiti in 1785, raised in Nantes and died in New-York in 1851, also travelled through Florida. This excursion, in 1832, as well as those he made in other American states, gave him the material to realize the famous watercolors whose beauty is familiar to us. An association for the protection of nature bears his name since 1905. It is also impossible not to mention, in this precursor of modern ecology, John Muir (1838-1914) to whom a plaque is dedicated in Cedar Key. This inscription reminds us that the founder of the Sierra Club, one of the oldest American organizations dedicated to the environment, passed through this place during the fabulous journey he started in 1867.
Once again, Corti Editions has published Fifteen Hundred Kilometers Across Deep America, a classic that cannot be ignored. In another style, quite similar, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) published Palmetto Leaves in 1873. The author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which had been a smash hit twenty years earlier, had decided to buy her son a house near Jacksonville so that he could recover from the Civil War. Succumbing to the attractions of the region, she decided to live there for part of the year, and to extol its charms in a book that would have as much impact on tourism as her novel had on the abolitionist struggle. The novelist and journalist Stephen Crane, who had also been involved in his own way in the struggle against segregation by publishing The Conquest of Courage in 1895, spent a few weeks on the peninsula the following year. He was supposed to embark for Cuba, but the ship The Commodore, on which he had taken a seat, was wrecked. If the young man, then 24 years old, miraculously escaped and told this story in The Open Boat, he died four years later of tuberculosis that he had contracted during this tragic episode. These two books are published by Sillage.
Folklore and commitment
The end of the century, probably the year 1891, witnessed the birth of Zora Neale Hurston. Contrary to what she mentions in her autobiography, she was not born in Eatonville, but rather in Notasulga, Alabama, although the Floridian town continues to pay tribute to her every year during a festival, because it was this city that saw her grow up and gave her her first short story(Drenched in light) published in Opportunity magazine. With a degree in anthropology, she studied voodoo in Haiti, but it was her portraits that made her famous, especially that of 86-year-old Cudjo Lewis, the last witness to the horrors of the triangular trade he suffered after his abduction from Dahomey in 1859(Barracoon, Le Livre de Poche). Although Zora Neale Hurston participated in the unique issue of Fire! magazine, the precursor of the Harlem Renaissance movement with which she is intimately associated, her literary work took a little longer to be recognized for its true worth.
Today, no one can doubt that Their Eyes Were Watching God belongs to the American cultural heritage, so much this novel is of an astonishing richness, admirably served in its French translation by Sika Fakambi who gave a new version for Zulma editions in 2018(Mais leurs yeux dardaient sur Dieu). Indeed, in addition to this grandiose portrait of a Black woman who reveals herself to be free in a society that is not, the author relies on the specificities of a community through a dialect that she tries to reproduce as accurately as possible, using phonetically transcribed terms and neologisms. A dive in the heart of the Everglades, demanding but unforgettable. It should be associated with the reading of Palmetto Country, a work by Stetson Kennedy. Between 1937 and 1942, this human rights activist, born in Jacksonville in 1916, directed the Florida Writers Project unit which, at the request of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), studied folklore and oral tradition. Equipped with a recorder, he collected traditional songs, folk tales and Hoodoo secrets. All these treasures became a fascinating sociological study that was published in American Folkways edited by Erskine Caldwell. A rare document to be found in its original language on the internet.
Key West and its writers
In the early 1920s, a man fell in love with the tip of Florida, where the peninsula reinvented itself as an archipelago. In 1934, he dedicated the poem The Idea of Order at Key West to these places, which in 1955 was included in the collection The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. But the modernist poet is far from being the only one to regularly visit the county of Monroe which, throughout the twentieth century, will see passing the writers. The most prestigious of them is certainly Ernest Hemingway whose house of 907 Whitehead Street - wedding gift offered by the uncle of his wife Pauline Pfeiffer that he lived from 1931 to 1939 - became since 1964 a museum which is dedicated to him. The 1954 Nobel Prize winner found in Key West the inspiration for many of his novels - For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Snows of Kilimanjaro, The Green Hills of Africa, etc. - but he also received his friends, including another writer of the Lost Generation, John Dos Passos (1896-1970), to whom we owe the monumental U.S.A. Trilogy(The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Fat Cake).
Among the other regulars of this "island at the end of the road", we should also mention Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) who finally preferred central Florida: her orange grove located in Cross Creek has been open to the public since the 1970s. The 1939 Pultizer Prize winner for TheYearling, a children's book adapted to film in 1946, was influenced by the rural setting that had so seduced her, to the point that she was accused of invasion of privacy by one of her neighbors who thought she recognized herself in Jacob's Ladder. Equally important in the American literary landscape, Tenessee Williams owned a house in Key West. It was the site of her love affair with the actor Frank Merlo until he died of lung cancer in 1963. The playwright outlived her by 20 years and left his mark on the theater with plays that are still widely performed today: A Streetcar Named Desire, Pussy on a Hot Roof, Sweet Birds of Youth, etc. Finally, the poetic field was worthily represented by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), and journalism by John Hersey(Hiroshima: Monday, August 6, 1945, 8:15 a.m., published by Tallandier), whose body has been lying in Key West since 1993.
Closer to home, the novelist Michel Tremblay has been escaping the harsh winters of his native Quebec since 1991 to enjoy the sun and the special atmosphere of the archipelago. Rewarded by many prizes, he was crowned in 2018 by the Francophonie, a tribute more than deserved in view of his abundant and truculent work.
If Florida knows how to be laughing and welcoming, it remains no less inspiring and attractive for writers who have a certain taste for the black novel. After having cut his teeth on New York in The Bonfire of the Vanities, a worldwide bestseller in 1987, Tom Wolfe is back with Bloody Miami, his latest novel published in 2013. The year before, Harry Crews - the unclassifiable author of Car (Gallimard), Naked in the Garden of Eden (Points) and Péquenots (Finitude) - who shared a weakness for the marginalized and the "rednecks" with James Carlos Blake, died in Gainesville. The latter, a pirate's descendant turned university professor, excels in historical thrillers: Red Grass River takes readers to the swamps of the Everglades in the early 20th century. Carl Hiaasen is just as incisive and biting(Mauvais coucheur and Presse-people in 10-18) but he also knows how to sketch his Florida with fervor for teenagers(Dans la gueule de l'alligator, published by Thierry Magnier). Finally, Colson Whitehead won his second Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for the remarkable Nickel Boy, inspired by the tragic true story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna.
A taste of Florida
Take the pulse of Miami with the beautiful book Miami by Horacio Silva published by Assouline. A pepsy and colorful book in the image of the Magic City that abounds with full-page photos to escape in a glance. Movie buffs and pop culture fans will love the book Miami: The 100 Cult Locations Map, which uncovers the filming locations of mythical movies, series and music videos. For an appetizer (literally!), you can buy Beach Party à Miami by Laure Sirieix in the collection Des villes et des recettes, in which you will find 40 recipes for cocktails and sweet and savory bites so Miami : Daïquiry, Key lime pie, Cuban flans... Poster Art of the Disney Parks by Danny Handke and Vanessa Hunt will delight Disney fans: it reveals and analyzes the most beautiful posters of the parks in the world, especially those of DisneyWorld in Florida.
