"Florida has stirred the imaginations of Walt Disney, Dick Pope, Elizabeth Bishop, and Carl Hiaasen, but beneath the iconography of popular culture Mormino reveals a complex social framework. He ranges far and wide across the landscape of a place that is at once the continental United States' southernmost state and the northernmost outpost of the Caribbean, from sprawling metropolises to those remote regions where the echoes of Old Dixie and a vanishing Florida can still be heard. He evokes contrasting and compelling images: the sacred and profane; the seductions of the beach and the dynamics of a graying population; the Fountain of Youth and a kitschy wasteland. This is a story of character and composition, of people and places, and of the enduring but changing meaning of a dream state."--Jacket.