Al Burt

Who was Al Burt?

Al Burt was a widely beloved Florida author and longtime journalist with The Miami Herald. He served as a sports writer, news reporter, editor, editorial writer and columnist.

Burt reported from Washington to Latin America and the Caribbean and throughout Florida. Before working with the Miami Herald he had positions with the Atlanta Journal and the Jacksonville Journal. He was seriously wounded by "friendly fire" while covering the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

For many years he wrote a back-page column for the Miami Herald Sunday magazine on interesting people and places around Florida that drew him quite a following. Florida author David Nolan said he used to buy the Herald just so he could read Al Burt's column. Many of those columns were collected in book form in Becalmed in the Mullet Latitudes, Al Burt's Florida, and Tropic of Cracker.

A scholar and advocate of the Florida Cracker, Burt was a longtime trustee of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Society—an organization that celebrated the life and work of the Pulitzer prize winning novelist who gave the Crackers dignity in American literature. He lived for many years in the picturesque historic town of Melrose, Florida, until declining health dictated a move to the larger city of Jacksonville not long before his death.