Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born Marjorie Kinnan in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1896. She attended the University of Wisconsin, where she majored in English, was a member of the school drama club, belonged to the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and was on the editorial staffs of the school literary magazine and yearbook. She graduated in 1918 and subsequently worked as a publicist for the Young Women’s Christian Association in New York City.{$S[A]Kinnan Rawlings, Marjorie;Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan}

In 1919, Kinnan married writer and boating enthusiast Charles Rawlings, and the couple moved to Rochester, New York. From 1919 to 1928, she wrote a newspaper column for United Features called “Songs of the Housewife.” During these years, Rawlings was also trying to publish fiction, although unsuccessfully. In 1928, she bought an orange grove at Cross Creek in Hawthorne, Florida, a north central Florida area to which she moved. In March, 1930, Scribner’s accepted her “Cracker Chidlings,” a group of anecdotes about local life.

In 1933, Rawlings gained national recognition with her first published novel, South Moon Under; that same year her marriage ended in divorce. South Moon Under was selected by a national book club and received superb reviews. The book examines the difficulties of a hunter’s life; its setting, the Florida scrub country surrounding Ocala, has been compared to Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Rawlings’s setting, like Hardy’s, approaches the function of a fictional character.

Golden Apples, Rawlings’s second published novel, is set in north central Florida in the 1890’s. It contrasts the struggles of a Florida boy and his sister who take over an abandoned orange grove to the way of life of a young Englishman who has disgraced himself with his father. Though flawed, the novel reveals much about Rawlings’s personality; her solitary life was an unfulfilled one despite her literary successes.

Rawlings’s best novel, The Yearling, appeared in 1938. It is the story of a lonely twelve-year-old, Jody Baxter, who makes a pet of a young deer; when the deer ruins the family’s crops, Jody has to shoot his pet. The Yearling, one of the great regional works of American literature, has been compared to Mark Twain’s 1884 masterpiece Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Jody was modeled after an orphan boy whom Rawlings met near Banner Elk, North Carolina, while she was living in a rented cottage working on the novel.

The Yearling was an immediate success; it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a best-seller, and within months, the film rights were purchased by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1939, the book received a Pulitzer Prize. Global acclaim followed, and the film version, shot in Silver Springs, Florida, not far from Rawlings’s Cross Creek home, was released in 1946.

In 1939, Rawlings was awarded membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters and received the degree of doctor of letters from Rollins College. She also taught a course in creative writing at the University of Florida. When the Whippoorwill, a collection of eleven short stories about the lives of north central Florida poor whites, was published in 1940. The title is drawn from the nature lore of Cross Creek. In 1941, Rawlings married Norton Sanford Baskin, a restaurateur and hotel operator, and moved to St. Augustine to be with him. Cross Creek, an autobiographical tale of the author’s years in the Florida woods, was issued in 1942. It was another Book-of-the-Month Club selection and best-seller and was made into a film in 1983.

In 1943, Zelma Cason, a former Cross Creek friend, brought a libel suit for $100,000 against...