"Helen Muir's account of Miami first appeared in 1953 and has grown through several revisions into the definitive popular history of a remarkable city. Marjory Stoneman Douglas, writing for the Chicago Tribune, called the first edition "vigorous, colorful, dramatic, variously detailed, jam-packed with people, fast-moving, a seething document...

Helen Muir threads her way vividly and surely through the tangles of modern crime, pretensions, and scandals, but also shows Miami growing enormously as an intellectual and cultural focus."".

"Updating this new edition through the 1990s, Muir brings the story of the frontier post transformed by Flagler, Tuttle, and a host of near-legendary figures and events to a new century of readers. To those who reflect on Muir's colorful epilogue, the city's primitive origins a hundred years ago will seem improbable - the characters and events of its boom, crash, and war years, astonishing - and the pace of its growth and transformation since that time, barely believable."--BOOK JACKET.