Kent Russell

Kent Russell is the author of I Am Sorry to Have Raised A Timid Son. His essays have appeared in The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, n+1, The Believer, and Grantland. In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell–broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure–set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida seemed to Russell to embody America’s divided soul. He called on two friends intent on filming the journey —but the journey promptly reduces the trio to filthy drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium; and attend a cuckold party. And we learn historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in an increasingly diverse new land of minority-majority cities. Russell has taken it all in and produced In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida (Knopf) a tome that is both an inspired travelogue and a profound rumination on the nation’s soul–and his own. Wildly vivid, encyclopedic, erudite, and ferociously irreverent, it’s a deeply ambivalent love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state. Lauren Groff in The Atlantic called it “Sharp […] Brilliant […] I’ve never read an account of our gorgeous and messed-up state that is a more appropriate match of form and function… this feels like both the real and the true story of Florida.”