The Miami Herald
Douglas arrived in South Florida when fewer than 5,000 people were recorded on the census in Miami, the streets were made of white dust, and it was "no more than a glorified railroad terminal". Her father, Frank Stoneman, was the first publisher of the paper that later became
The Miami Herald. Stoneman passionately opposed the governor of Florida, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and his attempts to drain the Everglades. He infuriated Broward so much that when Stoneman won an election for circuit judge, Governor Broward refused to validate the election, so Stoneman was referred to as "Judge" for the rest of his life without performing the duties of one.
She joined the staff of the newspaper in 1915, originally as a society columnist writing about tea parties and society events, but news was so slow she later admitted to making up some of her stories: "Somebody would say, 'Who's that Mrs. T.Y. Washrag you've got in your column?' And I would say, 'Oh, you know, I don't think she's been here very long'". When her father went on vacation less than a year after her appearance in Miami, he left her the responsibility of the editorial page. She developed a rivalry with an editor at
The Miami Metropolis whose greater familiarity with the history of Miami gave her cause to make fun of Douglas in writing. Her father scolded her to check her facts better.
Douglas was given an assignment in 1916 to write a story on the first woman to join the US Naval Reserve from Miami. When the woman did not show up for the interview, Douglas found herself joining the Navy as a Yeoman first class. It did not suit her; she disliked rising early and her superiors did not appreciate her correcting their grammar as a typist, so she requested a discharge and joined the American Red Cross, where she was stationed in Paris. She witnessed the tumultuous celebrations on the Rue de Rivoli when the Armistice was signed, and she cared for war refugees; seeing them displaced and in a state of shock, she wrote, "helped me understand the plight of refugees in Miami sixty years later".
Following the war, Douglas took on duties as assistant editor at
The Miami Herald. She gained some renown through her daily column entitled "The Galley", and had enough influence through the newspaper that she became somewhat of a local celebrity. She amassed a devoted readership and attempted to begin each column with a poem. "The Galley" was topical and went in any direction Douglas chose. She promoted responsible urban planning when Miami saw a population boom of 100,000 people in a decade. She wrote supporting women's suffrage, civil rights, and better sanitation while opposing Prohibition and foreign trade tariffs.
Some of the stories she wrote spoke of the wealth of the region being in its "inevitable development", and she supplemented her income with $100 a week from writing copy advertisements that praised the development of South Florida, something she would reconsider later in her life. She wrote a ballad in the 1920s lamenting the death of a 22-year-old vagrant who was beaten to death in a labor camp, titled "Martin Tabert of North Dakota is Walking Florida Now". It was printed in
The Miami Herald, and read aloud during a session of the Florida Legislature, which passed a law banning convict leasing, in large part due to her writing. "I think that's the single most important thing I was ever able to accomplish as a result of something I've written", she wrote in her autobiography.
Freelance writer
After quitting the newspaper in 1923, Douglas worked as a freelance writer. From 1920 to 1990, Douglas published 109 fiction articles and stories. Her first story was sold to the pulp fiction magazine
Black Mask for $600 ($}} in 2010). Forty of her stories were published in
The Saturday Evening Post; one titled "Story of a Homely Woman" was reprinted in 1937 in the
Post's best short stories compilation. Recurring motifs in her fiction were their settings in South Florida, the Caribbean, or Europe during World War I. Her protagonists were often independent, quirky women or youthful underdogs who encountered social or natural injustices. The people and animals of the Everglades served as subjects for some of her earliest writings. "Plumes", originally published in the
Saturday Evening Post in 1930, was based on the murder of Guy Bradley, an Audubon Society game warden, by poacher. "Wings" was a nonfiction story, also first appearing in the
Post in 1931, that addressed the slaughter of Everglades wading birds for their feathers. Her story "Peculiar Treasure of a King" was a second-place finalist in the O. Henry Award competition in 1928.
During the 1930s, Douglas was commissioned to write a pamphlet supporting a botanical garden called "An argument for the establishment of a tropical botanical garden in South Florida." Its success caused her to be in demand at garden clubs where she delivered speeches throughout the area, then to serve on the board to support the Fairchild Garden. She called the garden "one of the greatest achievements for the entire area".
Douglas became involved with the Miami Theater, and wrote some one-act plays that were fashionable in the 1930s. One, entitled "The Gallows Gate", was about an argument between a mother and father regarding the character of their son who is sentenced to hang. She got the idea from her father, who had witnessed hangings when he lived in the West and was unnerved by the creaking sound of the rope bearing the weight of the hanging body. The play won a state competition, and eventually $500 in a national competition after it was written into three acts.
Douglas served as the book review editor of
The Miami Herald from 1942 to 1949, and as editor for the University of Miami Press from 1960 to 1963. She released her first novel, entitled
Road to the Sun, in 1952. She wrote four novels, and several non-fiction books on regional topics including Florida birdwatching and David Fairchild, the entomologist turned biologist who imagined a botanical park in Miami. Her autobiography entitled
Marjory Stoneman Douglas: Voice of the River was written with John Rothchild in 1987. She had been working on a book about W. H. Hudson for years, traveling to Argentina and England several times. It was incomplete when she died in 1998.
The Everglades: River of Grass
Early in the 1940s Douglas was approached by a publisher to contribute to the Rivers of America Series by writing about the Miami River. Unimpressed with it, she called the Miami River about "an inch long", but in researching it became more interested in the Everglades and persuaded the publisher instead to allow her to write about them. She spent five years researching what little scientific knowledge was recorded about the ecology and history of the Everglades and South Florida. Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker, who discovered that all of South Florida's fresh water source was the Biscayne Aquifer, and it was filled by the Everglades. Parker confirmed the name of the book that has since become the nickname for the Everglades when Douglas, trying to capture the essence of the Everglades, asked if she could safely call the fresh water flowing from Lake Okeechobee a river of grass.
''[[The Everglades: River of Grass]]'' was published in 1947 and sold out of its first printing a month after being released. The first line of the book, "There are no other Everglades in the world", has been called the "most famous passage ever written about the Everglades", and the statement welcomes visitors to the [[Everglades National Park]] website. Douglas characterized the Everglades as ecosystems surrounding a river worthy of protecting, that was inescapably connected to the people and cultures of South Florida. She outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter titled "The Eleventh Hour": Cattlemen's grass fires roared uncontrolled. Cane-field fires spread crackling and hissing in the saw grass in vast waves and pillars and billowing mountains of heavy, cream-colored, purple-shadowed smoke. Training planes flying over the Glades dropped bombs or cigarette butts, and the fires exploded in the hearts of the drying hammocks and raced on before every wind leaving only blackness ... There was no water in the canals with which to fight [the fires] ... The sweet water the rock had held was gone or had shrunk far down into its strange holes and cleavages.
The Everglades: River of Grass galvanized people to protect the Everglades and is compared to Rachel Carson's 1962 exposé of the harmful effects of DDT,
Silent Spring, as both books are "groundbreaking calls to action that made citizens and politicians take notice". Its impact is still relevant as it is claimed to be a major reason Florida receives so many tourists, and "remains the definitive reference on the plight of the Florida Everglades". It has gone through numerous editions, selling 500,000 copies since its original publication. The
Christian Science Monitor wrote of it in 1997, "Today her book is not only a classic of environmental literature, it also reads like a blueprint for what conservationists are hailing as the most extensive environmental restoration project ever undertaken anywhere in the world". The downside to the book's impact, according to one writer addressing restoration of the Everglades, is that her metaphor is so prevailingly dominant that it is inaccurate in describing the complex web of ecosystems within the Everglades: "River of Grass" describes one. David McCally wrote that despite Douglas' "appreciation of the complexity of the environmental system" she described, popular conception of the Everglades shared by people who have not read the book overshadows her detailed explanations.