Twenty-five-year-old Seminole Toby Tiger lives in despair in the Florida Everglades. He loves the land and everything that exists in the natural world: the deer and egrets, turtles and herons, cypress trees and sawgrass, ponds and marshes, and, most of all, Allapattah, the crocodile. He watches helplessly as the white man imposes his will on the Seminoles, forcing them either to conform or to eke out a living wrestling alligators and carving trinkets for tourists.

Award-winning Florida novelist Patrick Smith's first novel, The River Is Home, revolves around a Mississippi family's struggle to cope with changes in their rural environment. Poor in material possessions, Skeeter's kinfolk are rich in their appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river on which they live—with its food supply, steamboats, and floods—figures strongly in their lives as the source of life, change, and death. Though their life is a simple one, it's filled with friendship, loyalty, love, and compassion.

In this best-selling novel, Patrick D. Smith tells the story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt-poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias MacIvey arrives in the Florida wilderness to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that the land has been exploited far beyond human need.

Godspeed Cedar Key isn't another end of the world book; it is a despite the end of the world book. Cedar Key is an island dangling off the western coast of Florida in the Gulf of Mexico. On a chilly February morning, the horizon across the bay is enveloped in a microsecond of piercing light, and in an instant the old world is gone forever. Fires burn on horizons around the planet but the heat eventually gives way to the creeping monotone of the skies. The gray sets in overhead and all around, determined to keep the sun away from the land and waters.

Few people today can claim a living memory of Florida's frontier Everglades. Glen Simmons, who has hunted alligators, camped on hammock-covered islands, and poled his skiff through the mangrove swamps of the glades since the 1920s, is one who can. Together with Laura Ogden, he tells the story of backcountry life in the southern Everglades from his youth until the establishment of the Everglades National Park in 1947.

The paths of the great American robber barons were paved with riches, and though ordinary citizens paid for them, they also profited. Les Standiford, author of the John Deal thrillers, tells how the man who turned Florida's swamps into the playgrounds of the rich performed the almost superhuman feat of building a railroad from the mainland to Key West at the turn of the century.

Danger lurks in the sleepy little town of Marathon, in the middle of the Florida Keys, as well as in the swamps of the Everglades. But danger doesn't expect to run into a man like Jesse. A man who will not only respond swiftly in facing it, but with a vengeance unexpected.

Comprised of vignettes from his own experiences of growing up in Central Florida, this native Floridian reveals "Old Florida" through its land, its people and their relationship to the times. This is not the Florida of the travel brochures or the concrete and glass glitz of the developers but rather the real Florida as known only by those who are proud to call themselves (or declare themselves) native Floridians. Laugh and cry with the exploits of these tough and proud people.

Six months out of high school and just days after finishing Marine boot camp, Jesse McDermitt is finally ready to unwind and have a little fun when he goes home on leave. But everything Jesse remembers—his friends, his family, the sparkling beaches and familiar waters of the Caloosahatchee River and Pine Island Sound, even his faithful Lab, Molly, have all changed.

No one more vividly captures the rugged majesty and enduring spirit of the American West than Louis L'Amour. Collected for the very first time are seven unabridged frontier tales from a legendary master of the genre. Volume One celebrates this remarkable voice in American fiction with a captivating blend of some of his best-loved work.

Award-winning Florida novelist Patrick Smith's first novel, The River Is Home, revolves around a Mississippi family's struggle to cope with changes in their rural environment. Poor in material possessions, Skeeter's kinfolk are rich in their appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river on which they live—with its food supply, steamboats, and floods—figures strongly in their lives as the source of life, change, and death. Though their life is a simple one, it's filled with friendship, loyalty, love, and compassion.

Twenty-five-year-old Seminole Toby Tiger lives in despair in the Florida Everglades. He loves the land and everything that exists in the natural world: the deer and egrets, turtles and herons, cypress trees and sawgrass, ponds and marshes, and, most of all, Allapattah, the crocodile. He watches helplessly as the white man imposes his will on the Seminoles, forcing them either to conform or to eke out a living wrestling alligators and carving trinkets for tourists.

In this best-selling novel, Patrick D. Smith tells the story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt-poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias MacIvey arrives in the Florida wilderness to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that the land has been exploited far beyond human need.

Few people today can claim a living memory of Florida's frontier Everglades. Glen Simmons, who has hunted alligators, camped on hammock-covered islands, and poled his skiff through the mangrove swamps of the glades since the 1920s, is one who can. Together with Laura Ogden, he tells the story of backcountry life in the southern Everglades from his youth until the establishment of the Everglades National Park in 1947.

Comprised of vignettes from his own experiences of growing up in Central Florida, this native Floridian reveals "Old Florida" through its land, its people and their relationship to the times. This is not the Florida of the travel brochures or the concrete and glass glitz of the developers but rather the real Florida as known only by those who are proud to call themselves (or declare themselves) native Floridians. Laugh and cry with the exploits of these tough and proud people.