Carl Hiaasen
From 1985 to 2021 Carl Hiaasen wrote a popular syndicated opinion column for The Miami Herald. Hiaasen’s acerbic, often humorous columns tackled both Florida-specific and national issues. A lifelong Florida resident and fierce defender of the state’s natural ecosystems, he is known for exposing and denouncing corruption in government and business. “I’m writing about people who have a public trust, and when they abuse that trust or do something corrupt or dishonest, I don’t think you can be too tough,” Hiaasen explained in 2021. Along with his opinion column, Hiaasen has written or cowritten more than 30 books—including satirical mystery novels and nonfiction books—many of which explore what he calls the “weirdness” of his home state.
- Name: Carl Hiaasen
- Occupation: Journalist and novelist
- Notable works: Opinion column for The Miami Herald (1985–2021), Strip Tease (1993), Hoot (2002), Bad Monkey (2013)
- Awards: Newbery Honor Book (2003), Damon Runyon Award (2004), Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award (2010)
Florida upbringing and education
Hiaasen was born on March 12, 1953, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He grew up in Plantation, Florida, with three younger siblings and parents who shared with their children a love of newspapers, including The Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale News (now the South Florida Sun Sentinel). He “fell for newspapers,” and, when he was about six years old, he asked his father for a typewriter and began writing stories. During Hiaasen’s childhood Plantation was semirural, and he grew up playing in the local fields and fishing in the wetlands near the Everglades. In 1970 he graduated from Plantation High School. That same year he started attending classes at Emory University in Georgia but transferred to the University of Florida two years later. He graduated from the latter university’s College of Journalism and Communications in 1974.
Journalism career
Hiaasen’s first job after college was at Cocoa Today (now Florida Today), where he worked for two years as a reporter. In 1976, when he was 23, he was hired at The Miami Herald as a city desk reporter. He also worked as a general assignment reporter and wrote for The Miami Herald’s weekly magazine. Later he became part of the newspaper’s investigations team, and in 1981 Hiaasen and fellow reporters Richard Morin and Susan Sachs were finalists for a Pulitzer Prize in local investigative specialized reporting for their series “Key West: Smugglers’ Island,” which exposed drug trafficking and corruption in that city.
Hiaasen witnessed economic development destroying the natural areas of his home state, and it angered him. When he began writing his column for The Miami Herald in 1985, he tackled numerous environmental topics, including pollution and overdevelopment. He also wrote about the local criminal justice system, racism, Colombian drug cartels, and school shootings, among other topics. In addition, Hiaasen covered national news, including the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin. Occasionally, his columns ventured into pop culture topics, such as the 1980s hit TV series Miami Vice and its glamorized portrayal of the city’s crime problem.
A “slash-and-burn” satirist
“Slash-and-burn was the only way I knew to do it. Even the satirical pieces could be scalding, but that’s what those who betray the public trust deserve.”—Carl Hiaasen, The Miami Herald, 2021
No matter his subject matter, Hiaasen took piercing aim at the bigwigs of politics and business. In an interview on the podcast The Literary Life in 2020, Hiaasen discussed his views on satire, noting that he began his journalism career while reporting on the scandals of the administration of U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon for his university newspaper. Hiaasen said, “All satire comes from a point of outrage, even anger, about injustice, something wrong. It’s not slapstick. It’s not the cheap laugh you’re going for, which is why I’ve been so lucky, and why my readers are so cool. First of all, they’ve stuck with me all this time, and second of all, they’re smart as hell. They get it.” Among Hiaasen’s infamous jabs were his calling Gov. Ron DeSantis’s spokesperson “that yammering stooge,” declaring Miami’s city hall a “bribe factory,” and denouncing the city’s mayor as a “slagheap of mediocrity.”
Novels
During the early 1980s Hiaasen began writing novels. His first three books—Powder Burn (1981), Trap Line (1982), and A Death in China (1984)—are mystery thrillers that he wrote in collaboration with Bill Montalbano, a good friend and fellow journalist. Hiaasen published his first solo novel, Tourist Season, in 1986. He has subsequently written more than a dozen novels that the nonprofit Florida Defenders of the Environment praised as “incisive, satirical renderings of those who profit over the destruction of natural Florida.” Strip Tease (1993), about a single mother-turned-stripper who goes up against a corrupt politician, was made into a 1996 movie starring Demi Moore, Burt Reynolds, Armand Assante, and Ving Rhames. Bad Monkey (2013), which follows a curmudgeonly former Miami cop as he tries to solve a murder, was adapted into a 2024 Apple TV+ series starring Vince Vaughn.
In 2002 Hiaasen published Hoot, his first novel for children. The plot follows three preteens battling the construction of a new restaurant to save a population of endangered burrowing owls. Hiaasen based the book on a troubling experience he had as a preteen watching a construction project crush the nests of ground-nesting owls near his home. Hoot was named a Newbery Honor Book in 2003 and was made into a film in 2006, starring Brie Larson, Luke Wilson, and Logan Lerman.
Hiaasen’s other children’s and young-adult novels include Flush (2005), Scat (2008), and Wrecker (2023). Skink: No Surrender (2014) was a National Book Award Longlist Selection for Young People’s Literature. The book features one of Hiaasen’s most well-known fictional characters: Skink, a “totally unhinged, roadkill-eating ex-governor” of Florida who abruptly left office and became a renegade environmentalist. The character has appeared in several of Hiaasen’s novels for adults, including Double Whammy (1987), Stormy Weather (1995), and Sick Puppy (2000).
Nonfiction books
Hiaasen’s newspaper columns are collected in Kick Ass (1999), Paradise Screwed (2001), and Dance of the Reptiles (2014). His nonfiction books are Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World (1998), a take-down of the Walt Disney Company and its damaging environmental impact; The Downhill Lie (2008), a foray into the sport of golf; and Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You’ll Never Hear (2018), a cynic’s view on university commencement speeches.
Retirement from The Miami Herald
Hiaasen retired from The Miami Herald in 2021. In his last column for the newspaper, he wrote about the philosophy behind his reporting and writing, which he called “sharp-edged”: “If what I wrote wasn’t pissing off somebody, I probably wasn’t doing my job.…Slash-and-burn was the only way I knew to do it. Even the satirical pieces could be scalding, but that’s what those who betray the public trust deserve.”
Personal life
Hiaasen has been married three times and has two children and one stepchild. In June 2018 his brother, Rob Hiaasen, who also worked as a newspaper columnist and editor, was killed along with four other people in a mass shooting in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. In a Facebook post Hiaasen said of his brother, “He spent his whole gifted career as a journalist, and he believed profoundly in the craft and mission of serving the public’s right to know the news.”
Honors
In 2004 Hiaasen was awarded the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club, and in 2010 he received the Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. In 2017 he received the first Marjorie Harris Carr Award for Environmental Advocacy from the Florida Defenders of the Environment “in recognition of Hiaasen’s decades of no-holds-barred investigative journalism and Op-Ed writing for the Miami Herald.”