Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Popular Books

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Biography & Facts

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American writer 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 of the same name. The book was written before the concept of young adult fiction arose, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists. Early life and education Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Ida May (née Traphagen) and Arthur Frank Kinnan, an attorney for the U.S. Patent Office. She grew up in the Brookland neighborhood and 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 into a contest a story titled "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty", for which she won a prize. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and received a degree in English in 1918. She was selected as a member of the local senior women's honor society on campus, which in 1920 became a chapter of the national senior women's society, Mortar Board. She met Charles Rawlings while working for the school literary magazine, and married him in 1919. Kinnan briefly worked for the YWCA editorial board in New York City. The couple moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where they both wrote for the Courier Journal, and then to Rochester, New York, where they wrote for the Rochester Journal-American, and where Marjorie wrote a syndicated column called "Songs of the Housewife". 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 settlement 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 Cross Creek residents, her Florida cracker neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land. Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie actually made many visits to meet with Calvin and Mary Long to observe their family relationships. This relationship ended up being used as a model for the family in her most successful novel, The Yearling. The Longs lived in a clearing named Pat's Island, but Marjorie renamed the clearing "Baxter's Island." Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in her writings. Career Author and writer Encouraged by her editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, who was impressed by the letters she wrote him about her life in Cross Creek, Rawlings began writing stories set in the nearby Big Scrub. In 1930, 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 concerning whom she was writing about, and rage, since one mother apparently 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 the Big Scrub 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, Florida, 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 Charles 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 (also set in the Big Scrub), a story about a Florida boy and his pet deer and his relationship with his father, which she originally intended as a story for young readers. It was selected for the Book of the Month Club, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. MGM purchased the rights to the film version, which was released in 1946, and it made her famous. In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks. Cross Creek also was chosen by the Book of the Month Club and was released in an armed services edition, which was sent to servicemen during World War II. In addition to Cross Creek (D-112), The Yearling (B-55 and S-33) and South Moon Under (724) were also published in the Armed Services Editions series. Rawlings's final novel, The Sojourner, published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about the life of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mother who favors her other, first-born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. 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. The novel was less well-received critically than her Florida writings and did little to enhance her literary reputation. She published 33 short stories from 1912 to 1949. As many of Rawlings'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." Invasion of privacy case In 1943, Rawlings faced a libel suit for Cross Creek, filed by her neighbor Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings had met the first day she moved to Florida. Cason had helped to soothe the mother made upset by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder". Cason claimed Rawlings made her out to be a "hussy". Rawlings had assumed their friendship was intact and spoke with her immediately. Cason went ahead with the lawsuit seeking $100,000 US for invasion of privacy (as the courts found libel too ambiguous). It was a cause of action that had never been argued in a Florida court. Rawlings used Cason's forename in the book, but described her in this passage:Zelma is an ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orange grove and as much of the village and county as needs managem.... Discover the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings books.