Al Burt (1927-2008) worked as a journalist for 45 years, the last 22 of which he spent as a roving Florida columnist for the Miami Herald. The recipient of numerous journalism awards, he was 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 and Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes. In his honor, the 1,000 Friends of Florida established the annual Al Burt Award for Florida journalism.
Description
? "Few people have traveled the state more, or know it more intimately, than Al Burt. For 23 years he wore out tire treads and shoe leather visiting all corners of the place. . . . Over and over again one is struck with how Burt managed to catch the last train, so to speak: to talk to the old people who remembered Florida as it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."--Miami Herald ? "The former Miami Herald editor and roving reporter pours out his love and concern for his home in true tales, shared in the manner of someone who has not only studied the state's history, but lived it."--Gainesville Sun ? "Al Burt's Florida serves as a personal memoir and informal history of Florida. It's filled with memories, good folks, and sharp observations."--St. Petersburg Times ? "[Al Burt] knows the state's secret wonders, its backwoods characters, and its few undiscovered hamlets better than anyone, and he writes about them with grace, wit, and charm."--Tampa Tribune ? "Burt's prose is a pleasure to read. . . . He has an exquisite feel for the land, and he carries his reader from the limestone depths of the peninsula, up through the marl and the sand, into the land of gopher tortoises, rat snakes, and sand pines, and finally into an atmosphere spiked with bugs and stirred by hurricanes."--Florida Historical Quarterly