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Rawlings Marjorie Kinnan
(1896—1953)

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. 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, also known as The Yearling. The book was written long before the concept of young-adult fiction, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.

Marjorie Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, DC, to Frank, an attorney for the US Patent Office, and Ida Kinnan. She was interested in writing as early as age six, and submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16. At age 15, she entered a story titled "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," for which she won a prize. 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 of the animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in her writings.

In 1926, Scribner's accepted two of her stories, "Cracker Chidlings" and "Jacob's Ladder," both about the poor, backcountry Florida residents who were quite similar to her neighbors at Cross Creek. Local reception to her stories was mixed between puzzlement of whom she was writing about and rage, as apparently one mother recognized her son as a subject in a story and threatened to whip Rawlings until she was dead.

Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of Cross Creek and its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several weeks near Ocala to prepare for writing the book. "South Moon Under" was included in the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

That same year, she and her husband were divorced; living in rural Florida did not appeal to him.

One of her least well received books, Golden Apples, came out in 1935. It tells the stories of several people who suffer from unrequited love from people unsuited for them. Rawlings herself was disappointed in it, and in a 1935 letter to her publisher Max Perkins, she called it "interesting trash instead of literature."

But she found immense success in 1938 with The Yearling, a story about a Florida boy and his pet deer, which he is forced to shoot when the deer grows up and eats the family's crop, and the break he makes with his father as a result of it. It was also selected for the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for 1939. MGM purchased the rights to the film version, which was released in 1946, and it made her very famous.

In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks. Again it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, and it was even released in a special armed forces edition, sent to servicemen during World War II. She followed that with Cross Creek Cookery, a compilation of recipes that was evidence of her passion for cooking.

Rawlings' final novel, The Sojourner, published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about a boy who feels unwanted as his mother is distracted with missing his absent brother. 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. Rawlings published 33 short stories from 1912 to 1949. Her editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s. Over the years, she built friendships with fellow writers Ernest Hemingway whom she met in 1936 and traded praises with about their writing, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald whom she also met in 1936 when Fitzgerald was recuperating in the mountains in North Carolina, Robert Frost, and Margaret Mitchell.

Because many of Rawling's works were centered in the North and Central Florida area, she was often considered a regional writer. Rawlings herself rejected this label saying, "I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't hold with the regional novel as such … don't make a novel about them unless they have a larger meaning than just quaintness."

In 1943, Rawlings faced a libel suit for her book Cross Creek by her very good friend Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings met the first day she moved to Florida. Cason, in fact, helped to smooth the angry mother made upset by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder."

Cason was outraged, and claimed Rawlings made her out to be a "hussy," although Rawlings spoke with her immediately and assumed their friendship was intact. Cason, however, decided to sue Rawlings for $100,000 US for invasion of privacy — a charge that had never been argued in a Florida court — as the courts found libel too ambiguous. Cason was represented by one of the first women lawyers in Florida, Kate Walton. Cason was reportedly profane indeed (one of her neighbors reported her swearing could be heard for a quarter of a mile), wore pants, had a fascination with guns, and was just as extraordinarily independent as Rawlings herself. The toll the case took on Rawlings was great, in both time and emotion. Reportedly, Rawlings was shocked to learn of Cason's reaction to the book, and felt somewhat betrayed. After the case was over, she moved away from Cross Creek and never wrote about it again, despite the fact that Cason and Rawlings eventually mended their friendship.

Rawlings won the case and enjoyed a brief vindication, but the verdict was overturned in appellate court and Rawlings was ordered to pay damages in the amount of $1 US.

With money she made from The Yearling, Rawlings bought a beach cottage at Crescent Beach, ten miles south of St. Augustine.

In 1941 Rawlings married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin, and he remodeled an old mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine (currently the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum). 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, and Rawlings and Baskin both continued their respective occupations independently. When a visitor to the Castle Warden Hotel suggested she saw the influence of Rawlings in the decor, Baskin protested, saying, "You do not see Mrs. Rawlings' fine hand in this place. Nor will you see my big foot in her next book. That's our agreement. She writes. I run a hotel." After purchasing her land in New York, Rawlings spent half the year there and half the year with Baskin in St. Augustine.

Her singular admitted vanity was cooking. She said, "I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing."

Rawlings befriended and corresponded with Mary McLeod Bethune and Zora Neale Hurston. Her views on race relations were much different than her neighbors, castigating white Southerners for infantalizing African Americans and labeling their economic differences with whites "a scandal", but simultaneously considered whites superior. She described her African-American employee Idella as "the perfect maid." Their relationship is described in the book Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' "Perfect Maid", by Idella Parker and Mary Keating.

Biographers have noted her longing for a male child through her writings, as far back as her first story as a teenage girl in, "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," and repeated throughout several works, letters, and characters, most notably in The Yearling. In fact, she stated that as a child she had a gift for telling stories, but that she demanded all her audiences be boys.

She was criticized throughout her career for being uneven with her talent in writing, something she recognized in herself, and that reflected periods of depression and artistic frustration. She has been described has having unique sensibilities; she wrote of feeling "vibrations" from the land, and often preferred long periods of solitude at Cross Creek. She was known for being remarkably strong-willed, but after her death, Norton Baskin wrote of her, "Marjorie was the shyest person I have ever known. This was always strange to me as she could stand up to anybody in any department of endeavor but time after time when she was asked to go some place or to do something she would accept -'if I would go with her.'"

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 the campus. Her land at Cross Creek is now the 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." Rawlings' reputation has managed to outlive those of many of her contemporaries. A posthumously-published children's book, The Secret River, won a Newbery Honor in 1956, and movies were made, long after her death, of her story Gal Young 'Un, and her semi-fictionalized memoir Cross Creek (Norton Baskin, then in his eighties, made a cameo appearance in the latter movie).

USA, 2008, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

USA, 2008.02.21, Hawthorne. Marjorie Rawling