For Sale - American Paradise: How Our Nation Was Sold an Impossible Dream in Florida
by: Willie Drye

Hardcover. Guilford CT, Rowman & Littlefield, 1st, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 294 pages, b&w illustrations. The story of how Florida became entwined with Americans' twentieth-century hopes, dreams, and expectations is also a tale of mass delusion, real estate collapses, and catastrophic hurricanes. For Sale -- American Paradise concentrates on the experiences of American icon William Jennings Bryan, journalist Edwin Menninger, and others who shaped the image of Florida that we know today and who sold that image as America's paradise. The cast also includes the Marx Brothers, Thomas Edison, Al Capone, a pack of backwoods bandits known as the Ashley Gang, and the visionaries and businessmen who poured their dreams and their cash into Florida in the roaring, raucous 1920s.