A Pine Castle Anthology

Book excerpt: Will Wallace Harney (1832-1912) came to the Central Florida frontier in the years immediately following the Civil War, and established a homestead south of Orlando on the shores of Lake Conway. There he used the native timber to construct a magnificent home which he dubbed, Pine Castle. Within a few years, the name was being applied to the entire neighborhood. Beyond Pine Castle, Harney was better known for his skills as a writer, though he only published one thin volume of poetry during his lifetime. Most of his works appeared in regular submissions to popular magazines and newspapers. In the century since his death, his words have occasionally appeared in local publications. But no comprehensive collection of his writings had ever been published before this present anthology. The collected poetry, fiction, and letters of Will Wallace Harney reveal the important regional writer as a complex character, as inconsistent and difficult to define as the times in which he lived.