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 always loved writing and in her youth won a prize for a story she submitted to the Washington Post. Her father, Arthur Frank Kinnan worked in the U.S. Patent office as an attorney. After his death in 1914 her and her mother Ida May Traphagen Kinnan moved to Wisconsin where she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

She received a degree in English in 1918 and the following year she married fellow student Charles Rawlings, also a writer. 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, named for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. Later Cross Creek, the source of inspiration for much of her writing, would know fame on account of her semi-autobiographical novel with the same name.

She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of the Florida Crackers. These rugged and independent people, although poor, inspired her with their resourcefulness and their close, harmonious relationship to nature. She would write about their way of life: hunting, fishing, farming and sometimes even moonshining. Skeptical in the beginnning, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up about their lives and experiences. On more than one occasion she lived with one of these families in order to gather materials and ideas for her writing.

Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection as well as a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize competiton. The novel captures the richness of Cross Creek and its environs, and incorporates local folklore about the moon and its phases. That same year, she and her husband were divorced. One of her least well received books, Golden Apples, came out in 1935. However, in 1938 she won international recognition with her book the 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 dormitory dedicated in 1958 as Rawlings Hall which occupies prime real estate in the heart of campus. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings had no children of her own; her land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park.[1]

Norton Baskin survived her by 44 years, passing away in 1997. They are buried side-by-side at Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, Florida. Rawling's tombstone, bears the inscription 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

Rawlings, before finding success with her novels, submitted many of her short stories about the local and colorful natives of Cross Creek to Scribner's Publishing House. The collection, When the Whippoorwill features one of her best stories, Gal Young Un, which won the O. Henry Memorial Award in 1932. It was through her association with Scribner's that she became the protege of legendary editor Maxwell Perkins. This relationship brought her into the company of a literary elite which included fellow writers Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost and Margaret Mitchell.

It was Perkins who suggested that she write a book in the vein of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one that would appeal to both a child and adult audience. The story's coming-of-age theme tells of a young boy, Jody Baxter, and his relationship to an orphaned fawn that he befriends. The story's subplot is about the family's struggle for survival in the Florida wilds in the late 1800s. Jody's relationship with his father is severely tested when he is ordered to kill the fawn that is eating the family's crops. The story's protagonist, Jody - a "yearling" himself - enters adulthood by coming to terms with loss and hardship. William Soskin in a New York Herald Tribune Book Review said of the story, "The Yearling is an education in life that is far removed from our dreary urban formulas...[This] story of a boy and an animal becomes one of the most exquisite I have ever read."

The novel, which won the Pulitzer in 1938 quickly went on to become a classic and, in 1939 a beautifully illustrated edition was produced with original artwork done by famed illustrator N. C. Wyeth.

Her nonfiction, autobiographical book, Cross Creek was published in 1942. Gordon E. Bielow in Frontier Eden summed up the anecdotal and homespun narrative by saying, "Through her tales the author reveals herself.... her philosophy of life and her mystical feeling for the land and nature."

Controversy

Cross Creek was well received by both the critics and the public, except for a neighbor of Rawling's who found issue with the way she was depicted in the book. Her friend, Zelma Cason, sued Rawlings for defamation of character over a passage in the book that she found unflattering. The trial was to take a toll on both Rawling's health and career, although she was ultimately exonerated of libel. In a letter to her lawyer, Rawlings comments on the effects the trial would have on other writers: " . . . what is to happen to all biography and especially autobiography, if a writer cannot tell his own life story, as I did in Cross Creek? And one cannot write his own life story without mentioning, short of libel, others whose paths have crossed his own. This is certainly in the realm of unquestionably legitimate writing" (Bigelow 261). The trial highlighted the dilemma writers face who draw on personal experience whether they are writing autobiography, or merely fictionalized memoir that often times blurs the line between fiction and nonfiction.

Rawlings never wrote another book about Florida; however, she did write a final novel, The Sojourner, which, in contrast to all of her previous novels, had a northern setting. In order to absorb the natural surroundings 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', based on her short story with the same name, was adapted for film in 1980 as was Cross Creek (1983). (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.

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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