Miami, U.S.A. (Florida History and Culture)

"The best book ever written on Miami."--Tampa Tribune

"A breezy, friendly history of Greater Miami from its days as a trading post to the present era."--Publishers Weekly

Helen Muir’s affectionate account of Miami first appeared in 1953 and has grown through several revisions into the definitive popular history of a remarkable city. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, writing for the Chicago Tribune, called the first edition "vigorous, colorful, dramatic, variously detailed, jam-packed with people, fast moving, a seething document. . . . Helen Muir threads her way vividly and surely through the tangles of modern crime, pretensions, and scandals, but also shows Miami growing enormously as an intellectual and cultural focus."

In the decades since, change has roared through Miami like a hurricane, and Helen Muir, at 89, remains active in the city’s cultural and intellectual life.

Updating this new edition through the 1990s, Muir brings the story of the frontier post transformed by Flagler, Tuttle, and a host of near-legendary figures and events to a new century of readers. To those who reflect on Muir’s colorful epilogue, the city’s primitive origins barely 100 years ago will seem improbable, the characters and events of its boom, crash, and war years astonishing, and the pace of its growth and transformation since that time barely believable.

Helen Muir first came to Miami in 1934 and has written for the Miami News, Miami Herald, Saturday Evening Post, Nation’s Business, and Woman’s Day. In 1999 she was honored as Chairperson Emeritus of the Library Advisory Board for honoring her continued efforts on behalf of the Miami-Dade Public Library system; she was also listed on the American Library Association/American Library Trustee Association Advocates Honor Roll 2000. She was inducted into the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame in 1984. She is the author of Frost in Florida: A Memoir and The Biltmore: Beacon for Miami.