When author Walter Farley and his wife Rosemary settled in Venice in 1950, they were two of roughly 1,000 residents in a then-sparsely populated section of south Sarasota County. The couple bought a piece of land along the beach and hired Sarasota School of Architecture luminaries Ralph Twitchell and Jack West to build a house and studio near the water for their rapidly growing family: daughters Pam and Alice and sons Steven and Tim. Like most people who move to Sarasota for the sun and sea, they took advantage of the beaches, bays, creeks, woods and sunshine that surrounded them.

On Wednesday nights, Farley went out with his buddies. On Saturday evenings, he and Rosemary dressed up, went out to dinner and danced the night away. Their regular haunts included The Pewter Mug in Venice, the Cajun Club in Sarasota  and Old South in Osprey, and they spent New Year’s Eve at Sarasota's Showfolks, a social organization for circus performers.

The Farleys may well have gone unnoticed on the outskirts of a town that was on the outskirts of Sarasota if not for one thing: Farley was the author of The Black Stallion, one of the most successful children’s novels of all time. Published in 1941, it’s the story of a young man and his horse, who survive a shipwreck and become inseparable on a desert island. It sold more than 20 million copies and is still in print today. It also spawned an entire series of books and a successor series, and was made into a film starring Mickey Rooney and Teri Garr that was nominated for three Academy Awards. Farley went on to write 20 more Black Stallion books and several other works of fiction and nonfiction.

But when he submitted his manuscript to Random House in 1940, at age 26, no one could have predicted The Black Stallion’s success. In fact, most people tried to nudge him away from writing children’s books.

“They said to my father, ‘That’s a great little book, but don’t expect to make a living writing children’s books,’” recalls Farley’s son Tim. “In those days, writing children’s books was basically an act of love.”

Walter Lorimer Farley was born into an Irish American family on June 26, 1914, in Syracuse, New York. When Walter was 5 years old, his father, Patrick, who worked in the hotel business, moved the family to New York City so he could take a position as the assistant general manager at the Roosevelt Hotel. Farley grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

From an early age, horses were Farley's passion. He spent lots of time with his uncle Bill Farley back in Syracuse. Bill was a veterinarian and a well-known horse trainer, and Farley helped out with the horses on Bill’s farm in Fayetteville, New York, each summer. Bill later settled near the Belmont Park racetrack on Long Island, which meant Farley got to spend plenty of time around the Triple Crown track’s stables.

Farley was an excellent student and athlete. He starred in tennis and track at Erasmus Hall High School and finished near the top of his class. He went on to attend Columbia University, where he majored in English literature. 

By the time he matriculated at the Ivy League school, Farley was also well on his way to writing The Black Stallion. He’d started dreaming up the story during childhood, and as a teenager, he wrote after school on the family’s dining room table, working out the details of 17-year-old protagonist Alec Ramsey’s adventures with his beloved Black Arabian horse.

In 1939, Farley met Rosemary Lutz, a New York University graduate student studying political science who had earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. As stunning as she was cerebral, Rosemary modeled for the John Robert Powers Agency, the first modeling agency of its kind in the United States.

At the time, Walter was working as an advertising copywriter on Madison Avenue. “She made more than my dad in the early days," recalls Tim. "She was a well-paid, beautiful lady.” The couple got married in 1941, just before the publication of The Black Stallion. Rosemary purchased the couple’s first home, an old stone farmhouse in Earlville, Pennsylvania, not far from Reading. Even after they moved to Venice, the family spent significant stretches of each summer at their farm, which was also home to many of their horses.

Soon after The Black Stallion was published, World War II broke out. Farley spent the next four years working as a reporter and editor for Yank, the weekly magazine published by the U.S. Army during the war. For a time, he worked in the Aleutian Islands alongside legendary detective novelist Dashiell Hammett, author of The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon. Farley’s job was to rein in Hammett, a longtime member of the American Communist Party, who had been using Yank’s editorial section as a platform for his political views.

After the war, the Farleys returned to New York for a time before moving to Southwest Florida. Venice perfectly suited their lifestyle. They loved to ride horses, sail and fish, all of which were possible in the subtropical climate. It was also a quiet place to raise a family.

“We had a horse, stalls and a little paddock area in the backyard," says Tim. "My sisters would ride their horses down on the beach. They’d ride down to the sandbars and herd the mullet through the water. [The area] was still rather unexplored. You could get away with a lot, and that was part of why you liked it. It still had that wild feel to it.”

Rosemary, who had a background in art and design, worked closely with architects Ralph Twitchell and Jack West on the design of the family’s home, which was built in 1953. The 3,000-square-foot waterfront home is a prime example of the Sarasota School of Architecture, which adapted modernist design principles to suit the local climate.

The Farley kids attended The Out-of-Door Academy on Siesta Key, and Farley's father Patrick enjoyed the area so much that he spent the last years of his life with his son’s family, enjoying Venice’s untamed coastal charm during the back half of the 1950s. The family also owned several boats, including a 35-foot sloop named Circe, the vessel of choice for Farley family adventures, which included regular trips to Gasparilla Sound and Charlotte Sound. Rosemary was always the captain.

“We’d sail down to Port Charlotte and stop at Plantation and some of the other islands that weren’t very popular back then,” says Tim. “We thought it was great. We’d spend a couple of nights on the boat and we’d collect coconuts.” He calls those excursions his family’s “feral days.”

His father, meanwhile, spent most days earning a living as a writer, building on the success of The Black Stallion. His writing schedule began long before dawn and typically incorporated a morning walk.

“He got up at 4 in the morning," says Tim. "He would start his day by writing letters to other writers or people he was interested in—jockeys, trainers or people that had horse farms”—all to compile information for upcoming projects.

“After that, he would go into his own world of writing,” Tim continues. Around 11 a.m., he would take a break and drive down to the Rexall Drugs on Main Street in Venice for coffee with Rosemary. In later years, they’d meet for lunch at The Crow’s Nest. For a time, he wrote at a nearby hotel before Rosemary had a writing studio built for him on their property in 1956.

When the four Farley kids were in their adolescence, tragedy befell the family.

Pam, the family’s oldest child, was killed in a car accident while studying abroad in Europe just before Christmas 1969. The loss devastated the family for years, and Walter never fully recovered from his daughter’s death. He quit writing for several years before returning with The Black Stallion and the Girl, a tribute to Pam, who, like her father, loved horses. He followed it up with The Black Stallion Legend, one of his darkest books, which finds protagonist Alec Ramsey and his horse leaving their farm after Ramsey’s daughter's death. The book delves into the Native American legends of the Southwest United States, and Farley, who traveled frequently to Arizona to research the book, became invested in the preservation of the Navajo language. As a result, Navajo is one of the dozen languages into which the Black Stallion books have been translated.

Farley refused to option his books for film for years, fearing that a movie version of The Black Stallion would gut the story of its nuance and turn the horse into an equine version of Flipper or Lassie. But he wound up selling the rights to his books to legendary director Francis Ford Coppola, known for The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. After familiarizing himself with Coppola’s work, Farley felt he could trust Coppola with his stories. Coppola served as producer on the 1979 Black Stallion film, directed by Carol Ballard.

Throughout the filming process, Farley worked closely with the production team, helping them find the perfect horse for the lead role: a Black Arabian from San Antonio named Cass Ole. Tim accompanied his father on the trip to find the horse and also worked as a photographer on the film. He went on to work on other productions with Coppola and director Roger Corman before becoming a successful photographer himself. His siblings have also been highly successful in the arts: His brother Steven is an author and his sister Alice founded the New York-based Alice Farley Dance Theater, which has created performances for the Smithsonian, Cooper Hewitt, Lincoln Center, Grand Central Terminal and the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

The Black Stallion film was a tremendous commercial and artistic success. One of the highest grossing films of 1979, it was nominated for two Academy Awards, and sound editor Alan Splet earned a Special Achievement Oscar for his work on the movie. In her review, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael called The Black Stallion “the greatest horse film ever made,” then added that “it may be the greatest children’s movie ever made.”

“My father was overjoyed that the film was popular,” Tim says. “He bought out the movie theater in Venice for two shows so that anyone who wanted to see it could.”

In 1983, a sequel—The Black Stallion Returns—was released with Coppola serving as executive producer. Like the first movie, it was highly successful. After the death of his child and the darkest period of his life, Farley was enjoying a renaissance.

In 1987, Farley suffered a stroke in Los Angeles while laying the groundwork for a third Black Stallion film. The stroke paralyzed his left side, confined him to a wheelchair and prevented him from doing many of the things that made his life so fulfilling.

“He couldn’t dance. He couldn’t write. He was frustrated,” Tim says of his father’s final years. Nevertheless, Farley found a way to continue the stories he created. He bequeathed the Black Stallion franchise to his son Steven and the two worked together closely in the late 1980s. Steven’s Black Stallion prequel series, The Young Black Stallion, has been popular in its own right, and in 2003, Disney made a Young Black Stallion film.

Farley died of a heart attack on Oct. 16, 1989, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. He was 74 years old. After his death, Rosemary continued to live in Venice while spending summers at the family’s Pennsylvania farm. She died in 2013, at age 94.

Today, nearly 35 years after Farley's death, his impact on Sarasota County lives on in both tangible and intangible ways. A passionate advocate for children’s literacy, he encouraged kids to read by visiting classrooms and attending book fairs across Florida, and began The Black Stallion Literacy Project, which provided reading materials and support to more than 1 million early readers. The program, once a national effort, continues today in Florida and Arizona.

Walter and Rosemary also played an active role in the planning of the Sarasota County library system. The couple helped found the Venice public library—now the William H. Jervey, Jr. Venice Library—in 1965. In 1989, the library established the Walter Farley Literary Landmark, and a wing of the library was dedicated to Farley. The library also retains extensive holdings related to his life and work. Every time a child checks out a book at the Venice library or decides to pick up a copy of The Black Stallion, that’s Walter Farley’s legacy in action.