About this item
The story of how Florida became entwined with Americans' twentieth-century hopes, dreams, and expectations is also a tale of mass delusion, real estate collapses, and catastrophic hurricanes. For Sale--American Paradise hones in on the experiences of American icon William Jennings Bryan, journalist Edwin Menninger, and others who shaped the image of Florida that we know today and who sold that image as America's paradise. The cast also includes the Marx Brothers, Thomas Edison, Al Capone, a pack of backwoods bandits known as the Ashley Gang, and the visionaries and businessmen who poured their dreams and their cash into Florida in the roaring, raucous 1920s. A tale of a colorful and tragicomic era during which the allure and illusion of the American Dream was on full display - a Jazz Age period when Americans started chasing what F. Scott Fitzgerald called "the orgiastic future" - the book reveals how the 2008 collapse of Florida real estate was eerily similar to events that happened there in the 1920s What sets the mid-1920s' Florida land boom apart from more recent booms-and-busts, however, is that this was the first time that emerging new technologies, mass communications, and modern advertising techniques were used to sell the nation on the notion that prosperity and happiness are entitlements that are simply there for the taking. Florida's image as a place where the rules of everyday life don't apply and winners go to play was formed during this dawn of the age of consumerism when Americans wanted to have fun and make lots of money, and millions of them thought Florida was the perfect place to do that.
About the Author
Award-winning author and journalist Willie Drye's latest book, For Sale-American Paradise: How Our Nation Was Sold An Impossible Dream In Florida, won a 2016 IPPY Award Silver Medal for Best Nonfiction, Southeast Region. He also won the 2007 Charlie Award for Best Public Service Coverage from the Florida Magazine Association.Drye is a contributing editor for National Geographic News and has written about hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis and dozens of other topics. His stories about Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike set page-view records at NG News. His work also has been published in the Washington Post, Toronto Globe and Mail, and other regional and national publications.Drye's first book, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, was praised by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, and others, and is regarded by many meteorologists as the definitive book about this tragic and fascinating event. The book was made into a documentary film by the History Channel titled "Nature's Fury: Storm of the Century."Drye served in the US Army Medical Corps, earned an Honorable Discharge, and graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in North Carolina, where he divides his time between Plymouth and Wilmington.
