Miami literature and Miami as literature are two completely different things, a tale of two novels, as it were: one a gritty, dystopian thriller where poverty and violence are swallowing the populace, and the other a bildungsroman of eternal optimism. These two fictional states not only co-exist but are mutually dependent upon one another. For there to be progress, after all, there must be something to progress from, and Miami has always evaluated itself in the hypothetical, in what it will be, not what it actually is. So living here sometimes feels like living in the first third of a novel, in which the plucky protagonist is suffering setback after setback, but something must change, right, or why would there be so many pages left?

Miami has always evaluated itself in the hypothetical, in what it will be, not what it actually is

Inside this funhouse of possibilities, writers have always thrived. We’re liars after all, and Miami is where lies go to become the truth. The city was only incorporated in 1896, and before the first world war, it operated more like Deadwood than a real city. “The sailors who docked in Miami said that Hell’s Kitchen could not compare with North Miami … ” writes historian Helen Muir in her 1953 book, Miami: USA. “Roulette wheels ran in the middle of Miami Avenue … Three reported killings a night were about average.” Muir was one of the first writers to mythologize Miami, but her instinct came from the founders themselves. Carl Fisher, who was laughed at when he bought a glorified sandbar and named it Miami Beach, was a natural showman, importing birds when he couldn’t find them and using elephants as valets; he even hired Italian singers to serenade his workers as they built his hotels. George Merrick, the founder of Coral Gables, once paid William Jennings Bryan $100,000 to orate for prospective land buyers. These people were authors who wrote with gold, and the promise of paradise inspired many copycats. In 1925, when Miami was still smaller than Key West, the city issued 7,500 real estate licenses.

Miami has always needed a corrective to this wild and ebullient optimism. Talking back to the powerful is one of the city’s great literary traditions, pioneered by Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Like Muir, she cut her teeth as a reporter at The Miami Herald. Her book Everglades: River of Grass (1947) launched the movement to save the Everglades from relentless development. One of the most unique and threatened ecosystems in the world, the Everglades is a big national park in southern Florida. Bordering the city to the west, it continues to exert a powerful influence on literature, from Michael Grunwald’s The Swamp to Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! to Steve Gerber’s 1970s Marvel Comic The Man-Thing.

There’s an old saying that a quarter of every building in downtown Miami was made with money from the cocaine trade

The Everglades has also served as a convenient place to lose a dead body. Akashic Books has published two different versions of their popular Miami Noir anthology, probably because there’s very little Miami literature that couldn’t, on some level, be described as noir. The crime family tree begins with John D MacDonald and Charles Willeford, and quickly spreads like a virus to Elmore Leonard, Edna Buchanen, Les Standiford, James Allen Hall, Vicki Hendricks, Lynne Barrett, Joe Clifford, and many more. Carl Hiassen blends noir with satire, and Dave Barry’s sense of humor comes from a Bogart-esque ability to smile as he surrenders to the worse-case scenario. Even adopted Miamians, like Edwidge Danticat and Russell Banks, skip the sunlight to investigate the darkness. Both novelists explore how immigrants respond to the power structures they inherit, and, in the case of Banks’s Continental Drift, how they are literally swallowed whole. In Diana Abu-Jaber’s Birds of Paradise, crime is the atmosphere around the protagonists. There’s an old saying that a quarter of every single building in downtown Miami was made with money from the cocaine trade. In other words, if you live here, you’re implicated.

Many of Miami’s crime writers got their start as Miami Herald employees, where they were bombarded every day with stories too strange to be fiction. The weekly paper across town, The Miami New Times, also has a great track record for grooming talent. Steve Almond worked there, as did The New Yorker editor and novelist Ben Greenman. Newer New Times blood includes n+1 contributor Emily Witt and nonfiction writer Gus Garcia-Roberts.

The Cuban experience

When favorite son Richard Blanco read a poem at the re-opening of the US embassy in Havana, the divide between generations of Cuban-Americans was obvious. Those for whom the brutality of the Castros will always be fresh in their minds held up protest signs on Calle Ocho. For most second- and third-generation immigrants, though, it was a sign that perhaps things might improve, and they could soon travel back to Cuba and visit relatives with a clean conscience.

Vega rejected his literary reception and instead worked as a bag boy at a local supermarket until he died at 86

That first generation is well-represented in Miami literature. Among that group, my favorites are Guillermo Rosales and Lorenzo García Vega. Rosales, who had already made a name for himself in Cuba with brilliant short novel El Juego de la Viola (published in English as Leapfrog), fled Cuba in the 70s and within a couple of days, found himself living in a corrupt Miami boarding house. His satirical portrait of living there became La casa de los náufragos (1987), perhaps the best book ever written about what locals like to call “the real Miami,” the one where more than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Vega too was famous in Cuba. As one of the original contributors to José Lezama Lima’s Orígenes – a literary vanguard group – Vega was a major literary figure in his home country. He fled from there in the 1960s and lived all over the world before settling in Miami for the last ten years of his life. A born trouble-maker who never suffered fools, Vega rejected whatever literary reception he might have had here and instead worked as a bag boy at a local supermarket until he died in 2012 at the age of 86. In poems such as By the Golf Course, Vega viciously pokes fun at Miami, though he refuses to call it by its name, rechristening it: Playa Albina, or Albino Beach. To date, the Chamber of Commerce has not caught on.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A continuous influence for Miami literature ... A road in the Everglades National Park, which borders the city to the west. Photograph: Alamy

The best representatives of the newest generation of Cuban-American Miami writers, those who were born here and forced to memorize José Martí poems as penance, are Jennine Capó Crucet and Marco Ramirez. Crucet’s debut collection of stories, How to Leave Hialeah, is a hilarious guidebook to Miami culture. Her latest novel, Make Your Home Among Strangers, builds upon the world of the stories by tackling the Elián González affair. What was for many of us simply another 90s reality television event was for Miami a litmus test for your politics, and Crucet recreates the drama by replaying a fictional version of it inside a typical Cuban-American family.

Jennine Capó Crucet’s debut collection of stories, How to Leave Hialeah, is a hilarious guidebook to Miami culture

Ramirez is a Julliard-trained playwright who is better known as a writer and producer for TV shows like Daredevil and Sons of Anarchy. When I was still getting accustomed to life in Miami, I went to see a musical he had created with his friends called Toners In Time, about two Miami kids who accidentally go back in time to the year 2002 after an accident at the Turkey Point nuclear facility. Given the chance to reform history, what is their great contribution to the world? They restart the musical genre Reggaeton before anyone else has the chance. I only got about half the Miami-based inside jokes, and it was one of the funniest theater experiences I’ve ever had.



Ramirez is not the most well-known playwright mining his youth in Miami, though. That would be Tarell Alvin McCraney, who grew up in the Overtown neighborhood and was trained by fellow Miami playwright Teo Castellanos. McCraney was the International Playwright in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and has developed work for The Public Theater in New York and Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater Ensemble.

I’ve barely mentioned my own favorite literary genre, which is poetry. It’s a little known fact that Robert Frost lived in Miami for the last twenty years of his life and wrote his 1962 collection In the Clearing inside the house he dubbed “Pencil Pines,” while the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote a book about his time in Coral Gables. Reinaldo Arenas published the literary journal Mariel here, and Langston Hughes gave several readings in Overtown, back before the construction of Interstate 95 decimated what had been an African-American-owned cultural mecca.

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There are too many poets to name in Miami now. The most decorated is Kingsley Tufts-winner Campbell McGrath. Another recipient of that prize is Chase Twichell. The grandaddy of Miami poetry though, for me, is the late Donald Justice, winner of the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes. He was born and raised here and attended University of Miami, but then never settled down here again for any significant length of time. Instead, he took over for his mentor John Berryman as the instructor of note at University of Iowa’s MFA program, where he taught Jorie Graham, John Irving, Rita Dove, John Taggart, Donald Hall, and many, many others. Based on the success of his students, it can be argued that Justice was the most influential poetry teacher of the latter half of the 20th century, and so, by extension, that Miami is the birthplace of 21st Century American literature.

Or at least, that’s how my Miami novel ends.

P Scott Cunningham is the co-founder and director of the O, Miami poetry festival, and the founder and executive editor of Jai-Alai Books, a regional publishing imprint. His work has appeared in The Awl, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Court Green, PANK, The Rumpus, RHINO, and Columbia: a journal of art + literature, among others. He tweets at @cunningpscott. He lives in Miami, FL.

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