Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings grew up loving to write and hoping to become an author. Later she moved to Florida, where she lived out in the country at Cross Creek in an area called the Big Scrub. She met the people who lived there, the so-called Crackers. Their simple way of life fascinated her, so she wrote stories about them. One of her books, called The Yearling, was about a boy and a pet deer. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Her dream of becoming a famous writer had come true.

Ages 9 12

Marjory Stoneman Douglas is called the Grandmother of the Everglades. Read about her life from her childhood up north to her long and inspiring life in south Florida.

She arrived in Miami in 1915 from her native Massachusetts, happy to be in the tropical warmth. She began to understood the importance of the Everglades, an area most considered a swamp. She called attention to it with her book Everglades: River of Grass. During her 108 years, she was a newspaper and magazine journalist as well as book writer. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her work on the...

An exciting biography about the man who changed Florida's east coast with his hotels and his Florida East Coast Railway.

Henry Morrison Flagler was already a millionaire when he first visited Florida in 1878. He liked what he saw. He came back and built railroads along the east coast so that others could more easily come. And he built grand hotels so that those who came had a beautiful place to stay. By the end of his long and productive life, he had built a railroad all the way to the very end of the Keys. It arrived in Key West in 1912. Henry Flagler was very determined and...