Background
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896 in Washington, D. C. , the daughter of Arthur Frank Kinnan, a patent attorney and a principle examiner in the United States Patent Office, and Ida May Traphagen Kinnan.
(Rawlings' first novel, South Moon Under, captures the ric...)
Rawlings' first novel, South Moon Under, captures the richness of Cross Creek 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.
https://www.amazon.com/South-Under-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/1388176815?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1388176815
(Cross Creek is the warm and delightful memoir about the l...)
Cross Creek is the warm and delightful memoir about the life of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings—author of The Yearling—in the Florida backcountry. Originally published in 1942, Cross Creek has become a classic in modern American literature. For the millions of readers raised on The Yearling, here is the story of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's experiences in the remote Florida hamlet of Cross Creek, where she lived for thirteen years. From the daily labors of managing a seventy-two-acre orange grove to bouts with runaway pigs and a succession of unruly farmhands, Rawlings describes her life at the Creek with humor and spirit. Her tireless determination to overcome the challenges of her adopted home in the Florida backcountry, her deep-rooted love of the earth, and her genius for character and description result in a most delightful and heartwarming memoir.
https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Creek-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/0684818795?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0684818795
(Written in 1928, the year Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved ...)
Written in 1928, the year Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved to Cross Creek, her autobiographical first novel, Blood of My Blood, was never published. Its existence was unknown to her contemporaries - including Max Perkins, her editor at Scribner's. Blood of My Blood is a portrait of the young artist very nearly ruined by egotism and through being alternately pushed and spoiled by her mother Ida. It is also a tender tribute to her father Arthur and a moving account of their relationship. But always at the center of the story is the intense love and hate that flamed back and forth between mother and daughter. Blood of My Blood reveals not only the painful process of maturation for a creative but tormented mind but also the steady growth of an artist. There are wonderful descriptions of the natural world, people, objects, and - uniquely for Rawlings - of the big city and city-dwellers. Born in Washington, D.C., and reared there until her graduation from high school in 1914, Rawlings' descriptions of the city are historically charming, and her depiction of the society where class distinctions were shaved wafer thin is remarkable for its pertinence nearly a century later.
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-My-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/0813024439?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0813024439
(One of the best novels by Rawlings, author of The Yearlin...)
One of the best novels by Rawlings, author of The Yearling. It is a poignant tale about a boy who feels unwanted as his mother is distracted with missing his absent brother.
https://www.amazon.com/Sojourner-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/1388179644?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1388179644
(Contains over 250 recipes and 30 breakfast menus, luncheo...)
Contains over 250 recipes and 30 breakfast menus, luncheons, camp dinners. Unique and collectible - where else can you get a recipe for cooking 'coot livers' and 'gopher stew'......?
https://www.amazon.com/Cookery-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings-1996-03-20/dp/B01HCAA6PO?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B01HCAA6PO
(The Classic Book on Southern Cooking First published in 1...)
The Classic Book on Southern Cooking First published in 1942, Cross Creek Cookery was compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings at the request of readers who wanted to recreate the luscious meals described in Cross Creek - her famous memoir of life in a Florida hamlet. Lovers of old-fashioned, down-home cooking will treasure the recipes for Grits, Hush-Puppies, Florida Fried Fish, Orange Fluff, and Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie. For more adventuresome palates, there are such unusual dishes as Minorcan Gopher Stew, Coot Surprise, Alligator-Tail Steak, Mayhaw Jelly, and Chef Huston's Cream of Peanut Soup. Spiced with delightful anecdotes and lore, Cross Creek Cookery guides the reader through the rich culinary heritage of the deep tidal South with a loving regard for the rituals of cooking and eating. Anyone who longs for food - and writing - that warms the heart will find ample portions of both in this classic cookbook.
https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Cookery-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/0684818787?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0684818787
( "Rawlings is among the first ten American story writers...)
"Rawlings is among the first ten American story writers today."--The New Republic, 1940 "She will help to make the American short story a living part of our literature."--Boston Transcript, 1940 "One of the two or three sui generis storytellers we have."--Atlantic Monthly, 1940 In The Yearling, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of 1939, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote the bleak but noble life of the Florida Cracker into American hearts. She secured her popularity as a storyteller and her status as a major voice in American literature in 1942 with the instant success of Cross Creek, the autobiographical vignettes that highlight her ability to create short fiction. Still, no assessment of the full range and power of her talent has been possible without this volume of all twenty-three of her published short stories, collected together here for the first time. Most appeared in Scribner's Magazine, The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. Scribner's printed Rawlings's first short story, "Cracker Chidlings," in 1931, just three years after she moved to an orange grove in the backwoods of north-central Florida. With a mix of frontier morality, ingenuity, and humor, the story introduced readers to Fatty Blake's squirrel pilau and 'Shiner Tim's corn liquor. Just as important, it brought her work to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, the famous Scribner's editor, who recognized her talent for storytelling and her eye for detail and who encouraged her to capture human drama in more "Cracker" stories. Though Rawlings was at home in a man's world, much of her short fiction is told in a woman's voice. She is merciless in "Gal Young 'Un" as she bores in on two women, both competing for the same man and struggling for their dignity. The story, published in Harper's, was awarded the O. Henry Memorial Prize for best short story of 1932 and was made into a prize-winning movie in 1979. Her most autobiographical story, "A Mother in Mannville," describes the sense of personal loss endured by a childless woman writer. Often at her best combining satire and sarcasm, Rawlings wrote a series of comic stories that featured Quincey Dover, her alter ego. "She is, of course, me," Rawlings wrote, "if I had been born in the Florida backwoods and weighed nearly three hundred pounds." One story Quincey narrates, "Benny and the Bird Dogs," reportedly amused Robert Frost so much that he fell off a rocking chair in a fit of uncontrollable laughter while listening to Rawlings read from it. Like others who wrote about the South, Rawlings grappled with the problem of how to portray honestly, yet without racism, the situation and the language of her neighbors. Her empathetic description of blacks and her portrayal of the Florida Cracker contribute a valuable perspective on twentieth-century American culture in transition.
https://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/0813012538?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0813012538
(A young boy living in the Florida backwoods is forced to ...)
A young boy living in the Florida backwoods is forced to decide the fate of a fawn he has lovingly raised as a pet
https://www.amazon.com/Yearling-Marjorie-Kinnan-Rawlings/dp/1388227339?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1388227339
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896 in Washington, D. C. , the daughter of Arthur Frank Kinnan, a patent attorney and a principle examiner in the United States Patent Office, and Ida May Traphagen Kinnan.
She attended the Washington, D. C. , public schools and in 1918 graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Wisconsin.
From childhood she had serious ambition to be a writer, actually winning at age 11 a $2. 00 prize for a story in the Washington Post.
During these years she wrote fiction, but with growing despair, unable to place a single story. In 1928, with typical impulsive energy, she left city and job and moved to a forty-acre orange grove in a tiny hamlet called Cross Creek, lying in a half-wild jungle area of north central Florida. She found here in the luxuriant beauty of the Florida countryside and in her poor-white neighbors, the so-called Crackers, a subject which deeply stirred her imagination. The Crackers, as she saw them, seemed wholly unlike the degenerate poor whites of Tobacco Road. They appeared to be a living remnant of the American frontier, existing precariously by hunting, fishing, farming, and sometimes moonshining, but intelligent and resourceful, with humor and a sense of beauty, living in closest harmony with their exotic natural setting. Within two years she had sold two Florida stories to Scribner's magazine and thus, fatefully, came under the eye of the great editor Maxwell Perkins.
As his protégée she joined a literary elite which included Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, all of whom she came to know. Books based on the Florida material now began to flow out: South Moon Under (1933); Golden Apples (1935); The Yearling (1938), her best-known book, which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1939 and was translated into thirteen languages; When the Whippoorwill (1940); Cross Creek (1942). Her last novel, The Sojourner (1953), represents a deliberate turning away from Florida and is based on farm life in Michigan.
After her second marriage she lived less at Cross Creek and more at her beach home near St. Augustine, Florida, and at a renovated farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York, where the northern rural atmosphere proved helpful to her last book. In 1953 she began gathering notes for a biography of Ellen Glasgow, whom she had known briefly, but she died at her beach home before she could begin writing. She was buried in Island Grove, Florida, in the midst of the Cross Creek country she had loved so well.
(The Classic Book on Southern Cooking First published in 1...)
(Rawlings' first novel, South Moon Under, captures the ric...)
(Written in 1928, the year Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved ...)
(Cross Creek is the warm and delightful memoir about the l...)
(A young boy living in the Florida backwoods is forced to ...)
(Contains over 250 recipes and 30 breakfast menus, luncheo...)
( "Rawlings is among the first ten American story writers...)
(One of the best novels by Rawlings, author of The Yearlin...)
Mrs. Rawlings wrote with candid realism of poor whites in an exotic setting, but with little of the prevailing pessimism or social consciousness of her time, and with little of the naturalistic resort to sex, violence, or sensation. Her work as a whole gives fresh expression to pastoral themes of central importance to the American cultural tradition, her young Crackers often reminding one of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking or Jefferson's idealized husbandman.
She was a nature writer of deep poetic sensibility, a worthy descendant of Thoreau, and her Cross Creek is a pastoral idyll which compares favorably with Walden. She was a meticulous stylist of the plainspoken sort with one of the sharpest ears for folk speech of any writer of her generation.
Quotations:
"A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life, to be thankful for a good one. "
"We cannot live without the Earth or apart from it, and something is shrivelled in a man's heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men. "
"I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to. "
"It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. We are tenants, not possessors, lovers and not masters. "
In personal appearance, she was short with small hands and feet, but gave most people the sense of strength and vitality rather than of delicacy. She had large, gray-blue eyes, a firm chin and direct gaze, and a way of holding her mouth which gave determination to her whole expression. She had on one side a quick wit and sense of humor, a marked earthiness and Keatsian joy in the senses, a love of people and conviviality, yet on another side she was a lover of solitude, with a puritanical, ascetic streak and a haunting melancholy. In cast of mind she resembled the great transcendentalists of the last century, having their same moral earnestness, the same idealism and optimism, the same intuitive depth. She was generous almost to a fault.
In 1919 she married a college classmate, Charles A. Rawlings, and until 1928 worked as reporter and feature writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Rochester Journal.
She divorced Charles A. Rawlings in 1933, and on October 27, 1941, married Norton S. Baskin, a hotel manager.