Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Books In Order

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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in 1896 in Washington, D. C., the daughter of Arthur Frank Kinnan (an attorney for the US Patent Office) and Ida May (nee Traphagen).

Marjorie grew up in the Brookland neighborhood and was interested in writing as early as the age of six, and she submitted stories to the kids’ sections of newspapers until she was sixteen. When she was fifteen, she entered into a contest this story called “The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty”, for which she won a prize for.

She went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and got an English degree in the year 1918. Marjorie 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. While working for the school literary magazine, she met Charles Rawlings, whom she married in 1919.

She briefly worked for the YWCA editorial board in New York City. The couple moved to Louisville, Kentucky, writing for the Lousiville Courier-Journal and then moved to Rochester, New York both writing for the Rochester Journal, and Marjorie writing this syndicated column called “Songs of the Housewife”.

In the year 1928, the Rawlingses bought, with a small inheritance from her mom, a 72-acre orange grove close to Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet known as Cross Creek for its location between Lochloosa Lake and Orange Lake. Marjorie was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, and she felt a transforming and profound connection to the land and the region.

While wary at first, the local residents did warm up to her quickly and opened up their experiences and lives to her. She made many visits to Mary and Calvin Long to observe their family relationships, and this relationship wound up being used as a model for the family in “The Yearling”. They lived in a clearing called Pat’s Island, however in the novel, it’s called Baxter’s Island. Marjorie filled numerous notebooks up with descriptions of the plants, recipes, animals, and recipes and used many of these descriptions in her writings.

In 1933, she and Charles got divorced, as living in rural Florida did not appeal to him as much as it did Marjorie.

Encouraged by Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner’s, who was impressed by the letters she wrote to him about her life living in Cross Creek, she started writing stories set in the Florida scrub country. In 1930, they accepted “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Cracker Childlings”, both about the poor, back country residents similar to her Cross Creek neighbors.

After being sued for libel, a case that she won, she spent less time in Cross Creek, and never wrote another novel set in Florida. The case took a major toll on her emotionally and time. She’d been stunned to learn of Zelma Cason’s reaction to her story.

She would remarry in 1941 to Ocala hotelier named Norton Baskin. They made their primary home at Crescent Beach, and they both continued their respective occupations independently. After buying her land in New York, she spent half the year there and half the year with Baskin in St. Augustine.

Marjorie’s singular admitted vanity was cooking. She got just as much satisfaction from making a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from producing a perfect paragraph in her writing. She befriended and corresponded with Zora Neale Hurston and Mary McLeod Bethune. Hurston would visit her at Cross Creek. Marjorie resisted the social norms of the time in allowing Hurston, an African-American, to sleep in her home rather than relegating her out to the tenant house.

Her final novel, called “The Sojourner”, was published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, and was about the life of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mom that favors her other, first born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. In order to absorb the natural setting so crucial to her writing, she bought this old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York, and spent a portion of each year there until she died.

“Cross Creek”, Marjorie’s memoir, was adapted into a 1983, and Alfre Woodward was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as GeeChee. “Mountain Prelude” was adapted to film in 1950 as “The Sun Comes Up”.

Marjorie won the Newbery Honor in 1956 for “The Secret River”. “Gal Young Un” won the O. Henry Award First Prize for 1932.

Marjorie died December 14, 1953 in St. Augustine, Florida, at the age of 57, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

“South Moon Under” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1933. Rawlings’ debut novel captures the richness of Cross Creek in telling Lant’s story. This young man has to support himself and his mom by making and selling moonshine, and what he’s forced to do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him to police.

Moonshines were the subject of several of Marjorie’s stories, and she lived with a moonshiner for several weeks close to Ocala to prepare herself to write the novel. It was a finalist for a Pulitzer.

“The Yearling” is a stand alone novel and was released in 1938. No novel better epitomizes the love between a child and their pet than “The Yearling”. Relive the wonder of a childhood favorite which has been capturing the hearts of readers for over half a century now. Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn that he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and is his best friend.

However life in the Florida backwoods is rather harsh, and so, while his family fights off bears, wolves, and even alligators, and they face failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody has to finally part with his dear animal friend.

The book was written before the idea of young adult fiction, however is now commonly included in teen reading lists.

The novel is Marjorie’s best known work, and has won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939. It was adapted into a movie in 1946 that starred Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, and Claude Jarman Jr.