Patrick Smith: The Novelist Who Gave Florida Its Great Pioneer Epic

Many Floridians say that to understand the soul of the state, you have to read one book, and that book is A Land Remembered. The man who wrote it was Patrick Smith, a storyteller who captured the sweep of Florida history like no one else.

Smith was not born in Florida but adopted it wholeheartedly, settling in the state and falling under the spell of its history and its people. He listened to old-timers, soaked up the lore of the frontier, and set out to tell the story of the pioneers who tamed the wild peninsula.

Published in 1984, A Land Remembered follows three generations of the fictional MacIvey family from the hardscrabble cracker cattle days after the Civil War to the booming, paved-over Florida of the twentieth century. Readers fell in love with its sweep, its heart, and its vivid sense of place. It became one of the best-loved Florida novels ever written and a fixture in the state’s classrooms.

Smith wrote other acclaimed novels too, and his work was honored with major literary nominations, but A Land Remembered is his monument.

Through that single epic, Patrick Smith gave Florida a way to remember where it came from, the swamps and scrub and cattle drives beneath the highways and high-rises. For countless readers, his book is the story of Florida itself.