Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings photo taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1953

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels describing the richly detailed natural settings of the Florida backcountry and the hard scrabble lives of those who settled it. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie with the same name. The Yearling which came out in 1946, starred iconic actor Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman who both were nominated for Academy Awards. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a pioneer environmentalist who reacted against the growing urbanization around her. Some have compared her semi-autobiographical novel Cross Creek to Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Additionally, she was an early supporter of Civil Rights when such a stand was unpopular in the American South.

Biography

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in 1896 in Washington, DC. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received a degree in English in 1918, then married Charles Rawlings, also a writer, in 1919. The couple moved to Louisville, Kentucky and then Rochester, New York, where they both worked as journalists for various newspapers. In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72 acre (290,000 m²) orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought the place to international fame through her writing.

She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of the Florida Crackers. Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions.

Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captured of the richness of Cross Creek and its environs. That same year, she and her husband were divorced. One of her least well received books, Golden Apples, came out in 1935. But, she struck gold in 1938 with The Yearling.

With money she made from The Yearling, Rawlings bought a beach cottage at Crescent Beach, ten miles south of St. Augustine. In 1941 she married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin, and he remodeled an old mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine. After World War II, he sold the hotel and managed the Dolphin Restaurant at Marineland, which was then Florida's number one tourist attraction. Rawlings and Baskin made their primary home at Crescent Beach.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings died in 1953 in St. Augustine of a cerebral hemorrhage. She bequeathed most of her property to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she taught creative writing in Anderson Hall. In return, her name was given to a new dormotory dedicated in 1958 as Rawlings Hall which occupies prime real estate in the heart of campus. Her land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park."Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park"

Norton Baskin survived her by 44 years, passing away in 1997. They are buried side-by-side at Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, Florida. Rawlings' tombstone, with Baskin's inscription, reads Through her writing she endeared herself to the people of the world.

A posthumously-published children's book, The Secret River, won a Newbery Honor in 1956.

Writing

Her editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s. Over the years, she built friendships with fellow writers Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost and Margaret Mitchell. Marjorie also became a civil rights advocate and befriended and corresponded with Mary McLeod Bethune and Zora Neale Hurston.

Sued for libel for her book Cross Creek, by her former friend Zelma Cason, Rawlings never wrote another book about Florida, but she did write a final novel, The Sojourner, with a northern setting. In order to absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York and spent part of each year there until her death.

Filmology

In addition to the The Yearling, Gal Young Un', and the semi-fictionalized memoir Cross Creek were made into movies as well. (Second husband Norton Baskin, then in his eighties, made a cameo appearance in the latter movie.)

"The Yearling" A Japanese animated version (titled "Kojika Monogatari") was created in 1983.

D- You are better at finding this stuff than I am. E

Works

• 1933 South Moon Under
• 1935 Golden Apples
• 1938 The Yearling
• 1940 When the Whippoorwill
• 1942 Cross Creek
• 1942 Cross Creek Cookery
• 1953 The Sojourner

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings." Dictionary of American Biography, American Council of Learned Societies, 1977. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings." St. James Guide to Young Adult Writers, 2nd ed. St. James Press. 1999. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings," Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale, 2007.
• "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings," Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography Supplemnent:Modern Writers, 1900-1998. Gale Research, 1998. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.:Thomson Gale, 2007.

External links

• "Correspondence and Manuscripts", University of Florida, Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "Bibliography", Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• Kay Harwell Fernandez, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, January 5, 2000;"Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at Cross Creek", Literary Traveler, Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "The Libel Trial About Cross Creek", Teaching Guide, Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park", Florida Online Park Guide, Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "Marjorie K. Rawlings Cross Creek Home", The Friends of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm, Inc., Retrieved April 4, 2007.
• "Photos of the first edition of The Yearling", Pulitzer Prize First Edition Guide, Retrieved April 4, 2007.

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