Mile marker zero

Set in the seventies, this group portrait follows the writers, painters, musicians and hangers-on who made Key West, Florida, their home. Their predecessors had Paris in the twenties, and later bohemians gathered in Greenwich Village, Big Sur or Woodstock, but this generation came of age in a tiny island town at the country's southern tip, a place that drew a remarkable circle of creative people. Some arrived to prove their toughness as writers, some to reinvent themselves, and some simply to vanish from their old lives.

The book traces how these figures discovered who they were on the island and kept their friendships alive for decades. It moves through heavy drinking, a steady supply of marijuana, multiple marriages and love affairs, all against the backdrop of a seductive but risky paradise. Its central figures include Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane and Hunter S. Thompson, whose circle shaped a distinctly American literary and artistic scene.

Rather than a traditional linear biography, the author presents the community as a whole, showing how its members invented, reinvented and found themselves in a place that has become a symbol of the country's highway at its end.