The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman

"The real story behind a legend. Josef Stenmetz, an Austrian immigrant, obtains a job with the post office in Figulus, Florida, his route taking him along a stretch of beach, which he walks barefoot. On his trip he is captured by Indians, but gets away and arrives in New York, still barefoot. He is spotted by an imaginative reporter who writes of a white man raised among Indians who delivers mail barefoot. A legend is born, Figulus becomes famous, and so does its postmaster, Earl Shank. A first novel."
"""Winningly satiric"" ~Paula Friedman, The New York Times Book Review A story of big dreams and lost shoes, The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman examines how truth becomes fiction in a joyful and hilarious satire of Florida tourism. Josef Steinmetz is a young immigrant seeking fortune in 1880s South Florida. Earl Shank is a small-town postmaster wit."@en
"A postmaster and a New York journalist embellish the experiences of the local immigrant mail carrier in order to create a tourist trade in a small post-Civil War Florida town."@en