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John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC

Marjorie Rawlings

 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an 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 of the same name. The book was written long before the concept of young adult fiction but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.
In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72-acre orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake.


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.

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.
She found immense success in 1938 with The Yearling, 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. 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.
Rawlings' 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 1912–49. As 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 her memoir Cross Creek first published in 1942, Rawlings described how she owned 72 acres of land and also hired a number of people over the years to help her with day-to-day chores and activities. An entire chapter of the book is dedicated to one woman she hired, whose name was Beatrice, but who was affectionately known as "GeeChee", because the woman was ethnically part of the GeeChee people. In the book Rawlings said GeeChee's mother lived in nearby Hawthorne, Florida and that GeeChee was blind in one eye from a fight in which she had been involved. GeeChee was employed by Rawlings on and off for nearly two years in which GeeChee dutifully made life easier for Rawlings. GeeChee revealed to Rawlings that her boyfriend named Leroy was serving time in prison for manslaughter, and asked Rawlings for help in gaining his release. She arranged for Leroy to be paroled to her and come work for her farm and had a wedding on the grounds for Beatrice and Leroy. After a few weeks, Leroy aggressively demanded more earnings from Rawlings and threatened her. She decided he had to leave, which caused her distress because she did not want GeeChee to go with him, which she was sure she would. GeeChee eventually decided to stay with Rawlings, but then began to drink heavily and abandoned her. Weeks later, Rawlings searched for GeeChee, found her, and drove her back to the farm, describing GeeChee as a "Black Florence Nightingale". GeeChee was unable to stop herself from drinking, which led a heartbroken Rawlings to dismiss her. Rawlings stated in her autobiography "No maid of perfection — and now I have one — can fill the strange emptiness she left in a remote corner of my heart. I think of her often, and I know she does of me, for she comes once a year to see me".


When Cross Creek was turned into a 1983 film, actress Alfre Woodard was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as GeeChee.
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 management or will submit to it. I cannot decide whether she should have been a man or a mother. She combines the more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her ministrations think nothing at being cursed loudly at the very instant of being tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles.
Cason was represented by one of the first female 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.
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. The toll the case took on Rawlings was great, in both time and emotion. Reportedly, Rawlings had been shocked to learn of Cason's reaction to the book and felt betrayed. After the case was over, she spent less time in Cross Creek and never wrote another book about Florida, though she had been considering doing a sequel to Cross Creek.
The books illustrations were done by Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 – October 19, 1945), known as N. C. Wyeth. During his lifetime, Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books, 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the work for which he is best known.  Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth, who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said in 1908, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other." In October 1945, Wyeth and his grandson (Nathaniel C. Wyeth's son) were killed when the automobile they were riding in was struck by a freight train at a railway crossing  near his Chadds Ford home