Keith L. Huneycutt – författare

Previously unpublished letters offering a view of everyday life in north Florida before the Civil War

In 1840, twenty-three-year-old George Long Brown migrated from New Hampshire to north Florida, a region just emerging from the devastating effects of the Second Seminole War. This volume presents over seventy of Brown’s previously unpublished letters to illuminate day-to-day life in pre–Civil War Florida.

Brown’s personal and business correspondence narrates his daily activities and his views on politics, labor practices, slavery, fundamentalist religion, and local gossip. Having founded a successful mercantile establishment in Newnansville, Brown traveled the region as far as Savannah and Charleston, purchasing goods from plantations and strengthening social and economic ties in two of the region’s most developed cities. In the decade leading up to the Civil War, Brown married into one of the largest slaveholding families in the area and became involved in the slave trade. He also bartered with locals and mingled with the judges, lawyers, and politicians of Alachua County.

The Letters of George Long Brown provides an important eyewitness view of north Florida’s transformation from a subsistence and herding community to a market economy based on cotton, timber, and other crops, showing that these changes came about in part due to an increased reliance on slavery. Brown’s letters offer the first social and economic history of one of the most important yet little-known frontiers in the antebellum South.

A volume in the series Contested Boundaries, edited by Gene Allen Smith

A newly discovered manuscript believed to be the first known novella written by a woman in Florida  

In 2015, an unsigned and undated 98-page manuscript was donated to the University of Florida. This work, titled The Storm, is published here for the first time, transcribed and annotated by Keith Huneycutt. Huneycutt presents evidence attributing its authorship to Ellen Brown Anderson, a writer who came to Florida and lived with family members before the Civil War. This book makes widely available what may be the first novella written by a woman in the state.



Likely written between 1854 and 1862, The Storm is set in Key West during the hurricane year of 1846. It is narrated by a young bride who tells the story of her first marriage, her struggle to make sense of a loveless and hopeless domestic situation, and the restrictions placed on women in her society. The story also presents a woman’s viewpoint on mid-nineteenth-century Key West, including the island’s shipwreck salvage industry and the town’s get-rich-quick economy, constituting one of the first fictional treatments of the Keys’ wrecking business.



Huneycutt’s introduction compares the text with other examples of women’s literature and works by Florida authors from the period. The appendixes include essays on the writings of Anderson and her sister Corrina Brown Aldrich, who may have also played a role in the tale’s creation. Huneycutt argues that The Storm is groundbreaking in many ways and that it deserves serious consideration as part of antebellum American literature.