What constitutes a classic Florida book? An author's passion for sabal palms, hurricane warnings, mildew, mojitos and the ability to pluck nuggets of truth from our rich and sometimes ugly history? A wicked sense of humor about the subtropical oddities -- flying cucarachas, copulating iguanas, six-toed cats, swamp-eating developers -- skittering through our everyday lives? We like to think that the theme that sets true South Florida literary classics apart from books spawned elsewhere is their unerring sense of the place and the people who constitute Florida's bizarre mixture of paradise and hell.

``Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world -- a fresh, free, unspoiled start,'' writes Susan Orlean in The Orchid Thief. To us, though, Florida is something else: home. Here are some of the timeless classics that capture life in the Sunshine State:

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston: Published in 1937 and set in Eatonville near Orlando, this gorgeous novel about an African-American woman's journey of self-discovery was once snubbed by intellectuals for its use of dialect and its refusal to frame the rural black experience within the context of the white world. But Hurston's exquisite rendering of Janie -- who ``saw her life like a great tree in leaf with things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches'' -- outlasted criticism to become one of the great American novels of all time.

Killing Mr. Watson, Peter Matthiessen: Now seamlessly melded with Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone into the National Book Award-winning Shadow Country, the trilogy's cornerstone reimagines the life and death of a Florida pioneer at the turn of the century. Set in Chokoloskee and the Ten Thousand Islands and based on the life of one Edgar J. Watson who, legend says, gunned down Belle Starr, Mr. Watson opens with a murder and winds inexorably back in time, painting a picture of a lawless and violent world.

The Everglades: River of Grass, Marjory Stoneman Douglas: This Bible of the Everglades, published in 1947, painstakingly reconstructs the history and makeup of what was once considered a vast, useless, mosquito-infested swamp and was instrumental in spurring efforts to preserve the area. ``There are no other Everglades in the world,'' Douglas wrote, and she dedicated a big chunk of her 108 years to helping preserve them.

The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Readers most remember with dismay this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel's tragic conclusion, but had we lived in a tiny rural town not far from Gainesville in the 1930s, we'd have realized that Jody's pet deer Flag was doomed from the start. In this memorable coming-of-age story, Rawlings also sharply evokes a time, a people and a place, much as she did in her nonfiction Cross Creek.

The Deep Blue Good-by, John D. MacDonald: His later novels -- The Empty Copper Sea and The Green Ripper, say -- are better and less dated. But with this mystery involving the first in a (seemingly endless) series of young women in desperate need of a knight in shining armor, MacDonald kicked off a trend that influenced more Florida crime writers than crime did. ``Salvage consultant'' Travis McGee, who resides on the houseboat Busted Flush in Slip F-18 at Fort Lauderdale's Bahia Mar Marina, is a self-described beach bum, spiritual and smart and not above the occasional bout of violence. His stoic heroism paved the way for tough-guy private eyes such as Randy Wayne White's violence-prone Doc Ford and James W. Hall's resourceful Thorn.

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