Kick Ass: Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

Continuing to write for pleasure in high school, Hiaasen again had his own publication, More Trash, an underground newsletter in which he experimented with irreverent commentary by poking fun at the traditions of mainstream adolescent culture, as well as satirizing the teachers and administrators of Plantation High. At Emory University, he ghostwrote a doctor's memoirs, and within the next two years, had married his high school sweetheart, Connie, become a father, and moved to Gainesville to major in journalism at the University of Florida.

When he graduated in 1974, having just turned twenty-one, Hiaasen was hired by Cocoa Today as a general assignment reporter, and soon after became a feature writer for their Sunday magazine, Sunrise. Two years later, in 1976, he was invited to join the Herald's Broward Bureau, where he remained for about six months before being moved to the newspaper's city desk in Miami as a general assignment reporter. He quickly became a feature writer for the Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic, and in 1979 joined two-time Pulitzer prize winner Gene Miller, associate editor for reporting, in investigating and writing "Dangerous Doctors," an eight-part series remembered today for its excellence and impact.

During the early 1980s, while still a member of the investigations team, Hiaasen began to write fiction, spending evenings and weekends co-authoring, with the late William Montalbano, three novels—the recently reprinted Powder Burn, Trap Line, and A Death in China. In 1985—as he was about halfway through his first solo novel, Tourist Season, one of seven (Double Whammy, Skin Tight, Native Tongue, Strip Tease, Stormy Weather, and Lucky You) that established his national reputation as one of America's best satirists—the Herald asked Hiaasen if he wanted to write a column.

Those at the Herald who knew him during these early years say that even in his twenties Hiaasen was clearly one of a kind, his gifts being distinctly extraordinary. Doug Clifton remembers Hiaasen as "a young man with talents that far surpassed those that you would expect from someone of that age and experience." Immediately evident, Clifton says, were Hiaasen's wit, probing mind, remarkable energy and the "incredible ability to handle himself in tough situations, to write with clarity, and to peer into things and catch their essence."

Since working as an investigative reporter with Jim Savage and Gene Miller, Hiaasen has written some 1,300 columns. A very few recount personal anecdotes—about bonefishing, or blowing up frogs as a child, or trying to find his young son's lost snake, Lefty. Others tackle national issues and political candidates or officeholders. Most columns, however, focus on the overdevelopment of crowded South Florida, its immigration inequities, gun- and drug-related violence, its image and scandals and tourists, and its misuse of taxpayers' money by venal or inept public servants.

The most passionate of Hiaasen's columns often concern politics, corruption, and the environment—in Florida, three closely related topics. Many of his colleagues believe, in fact, that Hiaasen's deep-rooted attachment to South Florida enables him to write with genuine lyricism about the Everglades, and with uniquely venomous, wickedly funny satire about those "greedheads," as Hiaasen calls them, whose make-a-buck morality has led to widespread environmental destruction.

Sometimes Hiaasen is brutally direct, calling one well-known Miami politician "a pernicious little ferret," another, a "worthless blowhard," and a third, "an affable, back-slapping, ribbon-snipping blob." Sometimes he chooses images to emphasize venality—certain legislators are, for example, the "favorite slobbering lapdogs" of canegrowers, and Hialeah's government is an "oozing sludge bucket of corruption," where "the air of graft and deception comes from deep in the soil, like radon gas." He skewers local- and state-level candidates as well, during one election referring to them as "a veritable slag heap of mediocrity" and wondering, "What is it about South Florida that compels people barely fit to function in society to go out and run for office?" However, because Hiaasen doesn't play favorites, he also attacks the "rich tradition of voter apathy, rotten judgment and shallow values" allowing corrupt or unqualified candidates to gain office in the first place, so close to taxpayers' money and so indifferent to their interests.