Fever Beach

The state of Florida holds a unique place in American culture. As one of the primary destinations for vacationers, it is a place many Americans have visited on a break from their “real” lives. The experience of enjoying a brief visit under the stage-managed conditions of tourism creates a paradoxical image of Florida as simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, real and artificial. The state’s climate, geography, and wildlife also seem exotic to many, setting Florida further apart from the rest of the country in the popular imagination. Florida is also home to Walt Disney World, part of a vast entertainment empire that lends another layer of exoticism and fantasy to the state’s reputation.

In recent times, Florida has also been stereotyped as a state of eccentric, bumbling residents with little regard for social convention. Many trace the beginnings of this stereotypical representation to the 2000 presidential race, when Florida’s antiquated balloting system held up the presidential election results for several weeks. Media attention turned to Florida for an extended period, and stories and articles often framed the state as backward. Confirmation bias and the frequency illusion played a part in the snowballing of national attention to events in Florida over the next decade. In 2013, the internet meme “Florida Man” made a game of finding humorously strange stories about Florida residents, further solidifying stereotypes about residents, and in 2023 and 2024, respectively, two television series—Florida Man and It’s Florida, Man—capitalized on the phenomenon.

Cultural analysts, however, often point to Florida as a microcosm of the United States itself. It is a demographically and economically diverse state with a large and rapidly growing population. The striking income gap between rich and poor is nearly equally divided between left- and right-leaning voters, but in recent years, the state has been almost entirely dominated by conservative politics and has become a battleground for conflicts over book banning, government regulations on business, civil rights, immigration, and voting rights. In other words, Florida mirrors the country it belongs to.

Even if Florida’s reputation for being more lawless and stranger than the rest of the country may not be fully deserved, it makes the state a rich setting for literature. All of Carl Hiaasen’s novels are set in Florida and draw on the alleged peculiarities of Floridian culture and politics for their humorous effect. Other well-known comic novels set in Florida include Karen Russell’s 2005 Swamplandia!, Hialeah Jackson’s Alligator’s Farewell, Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley series, Dave Barry’s Big Trouble, and all of Tim Dorsey’s novels.