About The Travis McGee Novels
When MacDonald created the character, he was to be called Dallas McGee, after the city, but after the Kennedy assassination he decided that name had too many negative connotations. He was searching for a first name for McGee when a friend suggested that he look at the names of the many Air Force bases in California. MacDonald's attention was caught by Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, and so he named his character Travis.
Beginning with The Deep Blue Good-By, released in March 1964, each of the twenty-one novels featuring Travis McGee has a title that incorporates a color. The first three books in the Travis McGee series were published in quick succession, at the rate of one a month, a highly unusual publishing strategy. According to MacDonald, he had earlier written an introductory novel about McGee that he burned as being unsatisfactory.
McGee has been called the first great modern Florida adventurer, preceding characters and situations that appeared in novels by authors such as Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, James W. Hall, and Les Standiford. Hiaasen specifically acknowledged his debt in an introduction he wrote for a new edition of The Deep Blue Good-By in 1994, commenting that even though MacDonald was now eight years gone, he believed McGee was still around, probably sipping gin on the deck of the Busted Flush and pondering whatever it was that Florida had become or was becoming. Singer/songwriter Jimmy Buffett expressed similar sentiments in the lyrics of the song "Incommunicado". In Salem's Lot by Stephen King, County Sheriff Homer McCaslin berates author Ben Mears' writing. McCaslin tells him to write "Like the guy who writes those Travis McGee stories".
Several of the science fiction novels and stories of author Spider Robinson also contain references to Travis McGee. McGee has also been linked to the Wold Newton family described in Phillip Jose Farmer's Tarzan Alive, and included on a genealogical chart in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.
The U.S. Library of Congress's "Center for the Book" commissioned a short work by MacDonald. The resulting essay, "Reading for Survival", is a conversation between McGee and Meyer on the importance of reading. The 26-page essay was released in a limited edition of 5,000 copies and was available for a small contribution to the Center for the Book.
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