Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings 1896-1953, American author, b. Washington, D.C., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1918. She was a journalist until 1928, when she moved to the Florida backwoods, where most of her novels are set. Cross Creek (1942) is a humorous autobiographical account of her life there. The Yearling (1938; Pulitzer Prize), is the story of a boy and his pet deer. Her other novels include South Moon Under (1933), Golden Apples (1935), and The Sojourner (1953).

Bibliography: See her correspondence with Maxwell Perkins (2000).

Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan (1896–1953), born in Washington, D.C., graduated from the University of Wisconsin (1918), became a journalist, and in 1928 “deliberately cut her civilized ties …and migrated to the firmly intrenched outpost of the vanishing frontier,” the hummock country of Florida that forms the setting of her fiction. Cross Creek (1942) is a humorous account of her adoption of Florida as a home and a source of literary material. She published her first novelette, Jacob's Ladder, and stories of the region's poor‐white farmers, hunters, trappers, fishermen, and moonshiners in When the Whippoorwill (1940). She further depicted this region in her novels South Moon Under (1933), Golden Apples (1935), and The Yearling (1938, Pulitzer Prize), about a boy's love for his pet fawn, which his father is forced to kill when it ruins his meager crops. Her Selected Letters was published in 1982.