Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
(1896–1953)

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings saw beauty and inspiration in the lives of poor farmers struggling to survive in an often harsh wilderness. By vividly describing the realities of living close to nature, she affirmed the fundamental values that, for her, made life worth living. Her novel The Yearling won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896, in Washington, D.C., where her father worked. From an early age, Rawlings loved to write, and her mother encouraged her to submit her work to the children's pages of local newspapers. At the age of 11, she won a prize for a story published in the Washington Post, and at 16 she won second place in a writing contest sponsored by McCall's magazine.

Rawlings also discovered her love of the country at an early age. Her father owned a farm in Maryland, where the family spent the summers living in tents, and where Rawlings and her brother spent their days hiking and fishing. Later, she would remember these summers in the country as her happiest childhood memories.

In 1914, Rawlings' father died just as she was to graduate from high school. Her mother decided to move the family to Madison, Wisconsin, to be near family friends. There, Rawlings attended the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in English and wrote for the campus literary magazine.

After her graduation from college in 1918, Rawlings moved to New York City, where she dreamed of finding success as a writer. In 1919, she married Charles Rawlings, a college classmate who also dreamed of being a writer. Rawlings and her husband both found jobs at a newspaper in Rochester, New York, where for years Rawlings was assigned to write feature stories and light poetry intended for women readers. Eventually, she came to dislike this job and to grow tired of city life.

Rawlings and her husband decided to buy an orange grove in Cross Creek, Florida, in 1928. Their life in Florida was not the romantic dream they had imagined. Despite her disappointment, however, Rawlings stayed on at Cross Creek. She had found peace in its harsh, but beautiful, natural environment. She had also discovered the setting and characters that would her inspire her best writing.

Rawlings felt instantly at home among the lakes, marshes, pine trees, and orange groves of Cross Creek's "scrub country." She immediately began to keep a journal of her impressions, describing the native plants and animals, her hard work in the orange grove, and the dialect and traditional customs of her neighbors. A year after her arrival in Cross Creek, Rawlings began publishing her observations as a series of magazine articles.

Rawlings's articles caught the attention of Maxwell Perkins, an important book editor in New York City, who wrote to her, suggesting that she use her observations as the basis for a novel. Her first novel, South Moon Under, published in 1933, won glowing reviews for its rich description of a way of life new to American literature.

By 1936, Rawlings was ready to start working on a novel about a young boy, based on an idea that Perkins had suggested to her. The result was The Yearling, published in 1938. It tells the story of a lonely boy from a desperately poor family who deeply loves the orphaned fawn he has rescued. The Yearling won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939. It went on to become an American classic.

The Yearling was a bestseller. It brought Rawlings the first financial success she had ever known and made her famous. After its publication, she met fellow novelists Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and became friends with poet Robert Frost. She was even invited to the White House to have lunch with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

After the excitement died down, Rawlings was ready to begin work on a book she had been planning for ten years, a book of autobiographical stories and essays called Cross Creek, which was published in 1942.

In 1941, Rawlings moved to St. Augustine, Florida, but could not adjust to city life. She missed Cross Creek, and she found it increasingly difficult to write without the daily inspiration of her special place. She struggled for ten years to complete her last novel, The Sojourner, which was finally published in 1953, just months before her death. Rawlings died unexpectedly on December 14, 1953. She was buried a few miles away from her beloved Cross Creek. Today, her homestead in Cross Creek is a state historic site.

Today, most people think of Florida as a tropical paradise full of beach resorts and theme parks, but this was not the Florida that Rawlings came to in 1928. Before the 1920s, much of Florida was wilderness, and even after the Great Florida Land Boom of the 1920s, most of northern Florida remained wilderness. Wealthy tourists and developers bypassed this marshy scrub country to reach the tropical southern beaches of Miami, Palm Beach, and Tampa.

Further, the Great Depression of 1929 hit at the same time that the orange groves of Florida were infested by a deadly invasion of Mediterranean fruit flies that destroyed much of the citrus crop. It was not the best time for an inexperienced northerner like Rawlings to try to survive as the new owner of an orange grove. Although Rawlings found personal satisfaction and creative inspiration in Cross Creek, her orange grove was never a financial success.

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