On this date in 1953, author and journalist Carl Hiaasen was born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., the first of four children born to Patricia (Moran) and Kermit Odel Hiaasen, an attorney of Norwegian descent. His mother, with Irish roots, was a teacher. He grew up in nearby Plantation.
Using a typewriter his parents bought him for Christmas when he was 6, he started writing stories while getting hooked on the Hardy Boys books, soon supplanted by his favorites John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger and Joseph Heller. He wrote humor columns after enrolling at Emory University in Atlanta and then transferring to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where he graduated in journalism in 1974.
He worked for two years as a reporter at TODAY in Cocoa before moving to the Miami Herald in 1976 as an investigative reporter, then as a columnist from 1985 until retirement in 2021. “Powder Burn” (1981) was the first of his 18 adult novels. “Squeeze Me” (2020) was the last as of this writing in 2024. Seven other novels are geared to “middle grade” readers. He has written three nonfiction works. His works have been translated in 34 languages.
“Hiaasen has turned his righteous indignation into humorous satire in which heroes and villains alike exhibit farcical quirks and an attachment to creative forms of violence. The good guys are often eco-terrorists seeking to preserve the ever-dwindling plots of undeveloped land; the bad guys wallow in greed as they pursue the rape of the state.” (Encyclopedia.com)
Hiaasen “has made a persuasive case that the most barbaric, ignorant and just plain awful people living in this country today reside, nay flourish, in the state of Florida,” wrote reviewer Joe Queenan. (New York Times, Jan. 9, 2000)
“Florida is a fertile setting for fiction because real life here is so bizarre,” Hiaasen said in an interview. “The kind of stories I write couldn’t take place anywhere else.” Asked what people might be surprised to learn about him, he said, “Readers always seem amused to learn that my uncle was a priest and my aunt was a nun. Clearly I took my life in a different direction … My job isn’t to preach. If you create a good story with memorable characters, readers will get on board. Your main duty as a writer is to keep them turning the pages. The characters carry their own messages.” (Penguin Random House interview, Sept. 15, 2023)
His only brother Rob was shot to death in 2018 along with four others at a newspaper in Annapolis, Md., by a man who had long-running disputes with the paper. Hiaasen had dedicated his 1991 novel “Native Tongue” to his brother.
He is clearly a political liberal but that doesn’t stop him from blunt criticism of the left or the right or from the willful ignorance of some aspects of religion. “Eons ago, when man lived in caves, dumb moves were often fatal moves. The quick and the smart survived, the slow and the dimwitted didn’t. If one member of the tribe ate a berry and died, the others henceforth avoided those darn berries,” he wrote in a column titled “Modern world puts evolution into reverse.” (Miami Herald, July 6, 1995)
“Over time, humans advanced and grew sturdier. Not anymore,” he continued. “Now we’ve got seat belts, air bags, antibiotics and stomach pumps to save fools from their own mistakes. That’s all right. Caring for others is one of the nobler traits of our species. The result, ironically, is that the genetic future of mankind isn’t so rosy. Stragglers once culled from the herd now (in the absence of saber-toothed tigers) operate motor vehicles, watch Jerry Springer, cavort in pollution and even breed. Darwin would be truly worried. The evolutionary gap between the bacteria and us is closing.” (Ibid.)
In a column titled “God: Go ahead, make my day,” he wrote about Florida U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s claim that gun rights are “granted not by government but by God.” Hiaasen countered, “Firearms didn’t exist when the Bible was written, and there’s no reference in either testament to “popping a cap in thy heathen backside. … Anytime a politician starts throwing God’s name around, people get suspicious.” (St. Augustine Record, Oct. 24, 2015)
He married Constance Lyford, his high school sweetheart and later a registered nurse and attorney, in 1970. They had a son Scott before divorcing in 1996. He married Fenia Clizer in 1999. They had a son Quinn before divorcing in 2019. In 2020 he married Kaitlyn Fox, 36 years his junior, whose background is in health care information technology.
Hiaasen’s 2013 novel “Bad Monkey” has been adapted into an Apple TV+ series starring Vince Vaughn that started airing in August 2024. His 1993 novel “Strip Tease” was adapted for the 1996 feature film starring Demi Moore and Burt Reynolds. Panned by critics and winning the Worst Picture Golden Raspberry, it earned Moore $12.5 million, making her the highest-paid film actress up to that time.
PHOTO: Hiaasen at the 2016 National Book Festival; Library of Congress photo under CC 1.0.
