Surely, other writers are on the Miami Book Fair schedule with Peter Matthiessen. If so, I forget.

Some other year, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, Russell Banks, Nancy Milford, Billy Collins, Sandra Cisneros, Rick Bass could collect their rightful veneration. But Matthiessen comes to Miami Sunday with the heft of his greatest novel and a nomination for the National Book Award. And he comes to a region that owes too much to his book for other writers to matter.

Matthiessen pulled Shadow Country from Florida swamp and muck. He conceived of the novel from musings three decades ago along the old Loop Road off Tamiami Trail. He built chapters around recollections and legends of pioneer families amid the Ten Thousand Islands. And he created, in 892 pages of fiction, history for a place that otherwise might forget it had such a thing.

Rebecca Smith, curator of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in Miami, can think of only two other novelists who created such an authentic vision of Florida: Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937) and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling, 1938).

''He conveys that sense of a time,'' Smith says. ``Anyone with a love for South Florida connects with his book.''

Shadow Country evolved from the retooling of his acclaimed Watson trilogy -- Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone By Bone (1999) into one volume. Matthiessen says he spent the last seven years cutting 400 pages from the trilogy derived from the life of an industrious and volatile sugar-cane planter with an outlaw past. Edgar Watson, who had acquired a murderous reputation, was gunned down in 1910 by a vigilante mob of his neighbors in Chokoloskee, a waterside fishing hamlet 40 miles south of Naples.

Matthiessen, 81, the son of a wealthy Connecticut architect, says he heard tales about the killing from his childhood days when his family vacationed on Captiva Island. When he was 16, his father took him by boat up Chatham River in the western Everglades and showed him the abandoned house of a sugar-cane planter suspected of a number of murders ``before his neighbors shot him to pieces.''

THE BEGINNING

Matthiessen's first notes on Edgar Watson date back three decades. No Man's Land, a 1981 essay on the Everglades written for The Miami Herald's Tropic magazine, deepened his feeling for the Watson story and the setting. Matthiessen, known for his writings on nature and the environment, incorporated vivid details of flora and fauna and shell mounds and meandering rivers until the terrain became as much a character as the farmers, Indians, plume hunters, poachers and smugglers who populate the Watson books.

Originally, Matthiessen produced what he described as ''an immense novel,'' 1,500 pages that terrified his publisher with its bulk. ''And so, like a loaf of bread, this elemental thing was pulled into three pieces corresponding to its distinct time frames and points of view.'' The trilogy was a critical success, but Matthiessen was never quite satisfied, particularly with the middle book. He saw Lost Man's River as ''a kind of connecting tissue'' lacking ``its own armature or bony skeleton.''

So he combined and tightened and cut, mostly from that soft middle, and enhanced the racial aspects of the original trilogy, particularly the tenuous position of a black man who joined that killing mob. It was unusual -- make that unheard of -- an author's giving himself a re-do of his most celebrated novels. But Shadow Country seems to have been a gamble that paid off.

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