Craig Pittman (writer)

In 2020, the Florida Heritage Book Festival honored Pittman as a "Living Legend".

How America's Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, is a "compulsively readable", native son's view of the state he "obviously loves", in which he makes a persuasive case that Florida has an outsize influence on the national culture.

[1] The book grew out of a series of articles Pittman wrote for the magazine, Slate.

[citation needed] Documents the decades-long rediscovery of the Florida panther, its election to state animal, and conservationist attempts to protect it from inbreeding, pollution, hunting, loss of food, and habitat loss.

It describes a controversy when the leading panther expert, Dr. David Maehr, covertly took money from wealthy donors and then wrote faulty science papers that would give developers the green light to "pave" over natural swamps and forests needed for panther habitat.