A short life of the author
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (8 August 1896 – 14 December 1953) was an American novelist, memoirist, and short story writer whose work — rooted in the scrub country and hammock land of north-central Florida — earned her the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling (1938) and established her as one of the most accomplished American regionalist writers of the twentieth century. She wrote about Florida not as a tourist destination or a retirement paradise but as a place where people lived hard, beautiful, impoverished lives in intimate contact with the natural world.
Early Life and Move to Florida
Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., attended the University of Wisconsin (where she studied journalism and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa), and worked as a journalist in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York, after graduation. In 1928, at thirty-two, she made the decision that defined her literary career: she and her husband Charles Rawlings purchased a seventy-two-acre orange grove at Cross Creek, a tiny settlement between two lakes in Alachua County, Florida.
The move was a leap into an entirely different world. Cross Creek was remote, rural, and poor. The Cracker families who lived there — descendants of Anglo-Celtic settlers who had inhabited the Florida interior for generations — scratched a living from the land, hunted, fished, and lived by customs and in a dialect that urban Americans found exotic. Rawlings immersed herself in this world with a passion and a seriousness that transformed her from a competent journalist into a significant novelist.
South Moon Under (1933)
Rawlings’s first Florida novel is set in the scrub country south of Cross Creek and follows Lant Jacklin, a moonshiner and hunter whose life is shaped by the rhythms of the natural world and by the economic pressures that drive men to illegal activity. The novel’s detailed descriptions of scrub ecology — the palmetto, the scrub oak, the sand pine, the wildlife — demonstrate Rawlings’s extraordinary powers of observation and her commitment to recording a landscape and a way of life that were already disappearing.
South Moon Under was a critical success and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, establishing Rawlings as a writer of national significance.
The Yearling (1938)
Rawlings’s masterpiece tells the story of Jody Baxter, the twelve-year-old son of Penny and Ora Baxter, homesteaders in the Florida scrub after the Civil War. Jody adopts a fawn (Flag) whose companionship fills the loneliness of his isolated childhood but whose growing appetite for the family’s crops forces a devastating choice: the fawn must be killed or the family will starve.
The novel is often classified as children’s literature, and it is among the finest novels for young readers ever written — but it is also a fully adult work, dealing with poverty, death, isolation, and the passage from childhood into the compromised world of adult responsibility. Penny Baxter — wise, stoic, endlessly patient — is one of the great father figures in American fiction, and Rawlings writes about the scrub landscape with a naturalist’s precision and a poet’s feeling.
The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 and was adapted into a 1946 film starring Gregory Peck. It has remained continuously in print and is one of the most widely read American novels of the twentieth century.
Cross Creek (1942)
Rawlings’s memoir of her life at Cross Creek is one of the finest works of American nature writing and one of the best memoirs of rural life in the language. The book describes the landscape, the wildlife, the farming, the cooking, the neighbours, and the daily rhythms of life in a place where the boundary between human habitation and the natural world is porous. The chapters on individual neighbours — Black and white, poor and poorer — are portraits drawn with affection, precision, and an honesty that does not sentimentalise rural poverty.
The memoir generated a lawsuit from Rawlings’s neighbour Zelma Cason, who objected to her portrayal in the book. The case — Cason v. Baskin (Rawlings had remarried) — went to the Florida Supreme Court and established important precedents in the law of privacy and literary freedom.
Cross Creek Cookery (1942)
Published the same year as the memoir, Rawlings’s cookbook is a collection of Florida Cracker recipes — coot stew, Florida soft-shell turtle, swamp cabbage, orange bread — written with the same literary skill she brought to her fiction. The book is both a practical cookbook and a work of cultural anthropology, documenting a culinary tradition rooted in the specific ingredients and techniques of north-central Florida.
Later Work and Death
Rawlings’s later novel The Sojourner (1953), set in the rural North rather than Florida, was less successful — she had left the landscape that inspired her best work. She died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1953 at her beach cottage in St. Augustine, Florida.
Legacy
Rawlings’s literary reputation rests securely on The Yearling and Cross Creek, both of which remain in print and continue to be read with pleasure and admiration. Her Cross Creek home is now a Florida state park and a National Historic Landmark. Her contribution to Florida literature — and to the larger tradition of American regionalist writing — is permanent.
Collecting Rawlings
The Yearling (1938, Scribner’s) in first edition with dust jacket (decorated by Edward Shenton) is a significant American literary collectible, bringing $500–$3,000. Cross Creek (1942, Scribner’s) first editions are also sought. The Scribner’s editions of the 1930s and 1940s are generally well-produced and hold up well physically.