The Florida Western usually takes place around the same era that most classic Westerns do, but their location is moved to the American Southeast, in and around Florida. Often, they will take advantage of their location by using the Everglades as a setting. If any Indigenous People are featured, then they are typically Seminole. The Seminole Wars and land disputes between settlers and the Seminole people are common points featured in these Westerns.
The Yearling
A young boy, Jody, living with his family on the Florida frontier shortly after the Civil War, must sacrifice his pet fawn for his family's survival.
Lure of the Wilderness
Jim Harper (on the run from the law for a murder he didn't commit) and his young daughter Laurie hide out near a swamp, while trapper Ben Tyler tries to clear the old man's name and the real culprits try finding him.
Seminole
Officer Lance Caldwell is assigned to Fort King in the Everglades. A boyhood friend of Seminole Indian chief Osceola, Caldwell opposes the maniacal Major Degan's plans to wipe out the local Seminole tribe.
Wind Across the Everglades
When poachers hunt down birds so they can sell the feathers for women's hats, newly hired Everglades warden Walt Murdock is ordered to bring in Cottonmouth, the brutal leader of the gang.
Rosewood
The true story of the 1923 razing of a black town in Florida, many of its people murdered over a lie. But some escaped and survived because of the courage and compassion of a few extraordinary people.
Black Sun Rising / la Corazonada by
Based on historical events in 1851, this Western noir novella traces the struggle of the first integrated Native American tribe to establish themselves on the North American continent.
Runaway by
Framed for murder, Tara seeks refuge with a gambler in 1830s New Orleans. They flee to the Florida wilderness, where whites and Seminoles engage in battle.
Red Grass River by
A masterful chronicler of the violent, restless & outcast, James Carlos Blake now transports the reader to early twentieth century Florida with stunning & lyrical prose, as he spins a powerful & breathtaking saga of the Ashley clan, and, specifically, of young John Ashley, whose slaying of a drunken adversary forces him into a life of crime. Relentlessly pursued by a betrayed former friend-turned-lawman over the span of two decades, John goes from petty criminal to bank robber & rum runner, gaining a deserved reputation as Florida's most notorious outlaw & mastermind of a raucous gang of "swamp rats" foolish-brave enough to take on the Chicago Mob. Against the background of a wilderness in transition--as thieves & opportunists move in to rape a magnificent land in order to build the glittering dreams of Miami & Palm Beach--is the story of two sworn enemies on opposite sides of the law whose personal vendettas compel them to strike mercilessly at each other's weaknesses. In the end, nothing will be spared--including the singular passion of John Ashley's life: a love as feral & sensual as the Everglades itself.
The Blood of Heaven by
One of the most powerful and impressive debuts Grove/Atlantic has ever published, The Blood of Heaven is an epic novel about the American frontier in the early days of the nineteenth century. Its twenty-six-year-old author, Kent Wascom, was awarded the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival Prize for fiction, and this first novel shows the kind of talent rarely seen in any novelist, no matter their age. The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr. The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.
Trail from St. Augustine by
Cracker Westerns are rip-roarin, action-packed, can't-put-'em-down tales set in the frontier days of Florida. They are full of adventure, real heroes, and vivid, authentic details that bring Florida's history to life. In the spring of 1771, John MacKenzie arrives in British-ruled St. Augustine after a year of fur trapping. He is quickly drawn into an adventure that involves defending a young woman indentured to the powerful and treacherous James Tyrone. MacKenzie and Becky Campbell set out across the untamed Florida wilderness, accompanied by a crusty sailor named Blackpool Bobby and Jeremiah, a black slave-hunter. They are pursued by Tyrone's murderous trackers toward buried gold and a showdown on the windswept sands of the Florida Gulf coast. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series
The Yearling by
An American classic--and Pulitzer Prize-winning story--that shows the ultimate bond between child and pet, now in a lush keepsake edition. No novel better epitomizes the love between a child and a pet than The Yearling. When young Jody Baxter adopts and orphaned fawn he calls Flag, he makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend. There has been a film and even a musical based on this moving story, a fine work of great American literature which won Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings a Pulitzer Prize. Complete with N.C. Wyeth's original oil paintings, this glowing work features a soft touch cover, gold foiling, and tip-in artwork.
Shadow Country by
2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Peter Matthiessen''s great American epic-Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man''s River, and Bone by Bone-was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son. Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson''s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation." Peter Matthiessen''s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said "I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more." Praise for Shadow Country "Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison''s Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren''s All the King''s Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth-as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time." -- The New York Review of Books "Magnificent and capacious.... I''ll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three-part saga into a new thing.... Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson''s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate....a breathtaking saga." -- The Los Angeles Times "Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of [Matthiessen''s] career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick." -- National Geographic Adventure magazine "Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida -- and crafts something even better...[He] deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature....Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel." -- Miami Herald "Matthiessen is writing about one man''s life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson''s story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost....Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen''s, this is his great book." -- St. Petersburg Times "Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation." --Seattle Times "Shadow Country" is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen''s integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision....a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. -- East Hampton Star "Matthiessen''s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature...this reworking...is remarkable....Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it''s difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick of the Week "Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy''s novels...a mosaic about the life and lynch-mob death of a turn-of-the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson -- into the 900-plus-page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books'' rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel." -- Men''s Journal "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. SHADOW COUNTRY lives up to anyone''s highest expectations for great writing." -- Richard Ford "Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos. His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable." -- Joyce Carol Oates "Peter Matthiessen''s work, both in fiction and non-fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose. The Watson saga-in-the-round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement. SHADOW COUNTRY, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." -- W.S. Merwin
