Thursday, February 20 | 6:00 PM
Join FAU Professor Taylor Hagood for an insightful discussion on the author Carl Hiaasen. Carl Hiaasen’s novels have continued a great tradition of Florida crime writing. That tradition began with Brett Halliday and Theodore Pratt and continued through such writers as John D. MacDonald and Lawrence Sanders up until Hiaasen’s contemporaries, including James W. Hall and Randy Wayne White. Hiaasen has added a unique ingredient—a brand of humor that makes the horrific funny, in a way only a native Floridian can do. The south Florida Hiaasen conjures is drenched in situational absurdity worthy of fellow Florida writer Harry Crews or the Russian master of the absurd, Mikhail Bulgakov. Hiaasen books are both best-sellers and works of art, an extremely difficult achievement. In this overview of Hiaasen’s works and career, Professor Taylor Hagood highlights the paradoxical pleasures of reading Hiaasen Florida Noir.
Taylor Hagood, Professor of American Literature at Florida Atlantic University, is the author of the recently published biography, Theodore Pratt: A Florida Writer’s Life, as well as the biography/true crime, Stringbean: The Life and Murder of a Country Music Legend. A specialist in the literature of the southern United States, he has written and edited several books of literary criticism, most notably Faulkner, Writer of Disability, which won the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Studies. Hagood regularly lectures at the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and clubs, museums, and institutions in south Florida.
Drop-ins welcome. This free program is sponsored by the Festival of the Arts Boca.
