Florida Gothic
Florida Gothic Zora Neale Hurston and the Sunshine State's Crime of the Century Librarian of Celaeno On August 3, 1952, Ruby McCollum, a black woman living in Live Oak, Florida, drove with her two youngest children to the office of Leroy Adams, a beloved local white doctor and newly elected state senator, and shot him to death in his waiting room. She was arrested shortly after and put on trial in a case that attracted national news. It was a real life story that resembled nothing less than the plot of a Southern Gothic novel, and it is thus fitting that the most notable reporter that showed up to cover the proceedings was one of the greatest Southern writers, Zora Neale Hurston. It was her story, a crime story, a black story, a Southern story, and a Florida story, particular in all those ways, and yet something Aeschylus would have recognized as the tragic course of human nature. I’ve written about Florida before - my native state, my favorite state. Its past is as fascina...