THE CRACK OF the old-time cow hunter's whip gave the native Floridian a nickname, but Al Burt's The Tropic of Cracker is a state of mind shared by those who love "what remains of the Florida that needed no blueprint or balance sheet for its creation, that was here before there was a can opener or a commercial or a real-estate agent."

In his years of roving the state as a Miami Herald columnist, Al Burt mapped Florida's Tropic of Cracker, not with lines of latitude and longitude but with stories. The Crackers Burt tells of are men and women from Apalachicola to the Everglades, from Tallahassee to the Keys. They lived in the late 1800s, and they live today -- along the Ocklawaha and in the floodplains of Lake Okeechobee. They were cow hunters, Conchs, and alligator men. They were grew oranges, sugarcane, and muscadine grapes. They made moonshine. They drove mules, ate fried mullet, and told yarns in a Cracker creole about Florida's panthers, snakes, alligators, and hurricanes. There are luminaries among them, and writing about them -- Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Virgil Hawkins, John DeGrove, Harry Crews -- but mostly they are just regular folk who mark the borders of the elusive and magical Tropic of Cracker.

For anyone who loves the old Florida and still has hope for the new one, The Tropic of Cracker is the state's truest road map and Al Burt its most eloquent cartographer.

Al Burt worked as a journalist for forty-five years, the last twenty-two at the Miami Herald. The recipient of numerous journalism awards, he was a freelance contributor to many magazines, including The Nation and Historic Preservation, and the author of several books, among them Florida: A Place in the Sun, Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes, and Al Burt's Florida: Snowbirds, Sand Castles, and Self-Rising Crackers, which was awarded the 1998 Patrick D. Smith Florida Literature Book Award. In his honor, the 1,000 Friends of Florida established the annual Al Burt Award for Florida journalism.