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
