Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) began writing as a child, but the kind of literary success she craved eluded her for some time. Her best known work remains The Yearling, the story of a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was subsequently made into a successful movie. Despite being criticized for her uneven talent, Rawlings kept writing, driven by her fascination with the land and people of Cross Creek, Florida.
Rawlings worked on newspapers in many cities as a reporter and feature writer. While supporting herself through newspaper work she attempted to write fiction for magazines:
“I tried to write what I thought they [popular magazines] would be most likely to buy and all that brought me was rejection slips. Then in 1928 I had an opportunity to buy an orange grove in Florida and I bought it, left the newspaper and settled down to give all my time to fiction. Still the stories didn’t sell, so I gave up … But then I thought—just one more. An I wrote a story that seemed far from ‘commercial,’ that—it seemed to me—no editor would want to buy but that had meaning for me. It sold like a shot and I’ve had no trouble selling since, though I never have tried to write ‘commercially.’”
Major works
- The Yearling
- The Secret River
- The Sojourner
- Short Stories by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- Cross Creek
- Cross Creek Cookery
Autobiographies and Biographies about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- Selected Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings by Gordon E. Bigelow
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek by Elizabeth Silverthorne
More information
Visit Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s home
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes
“We never run from conditions and circumstances but from ourselves, as Wolfe did, so that actually we make no escape. But there are times when it doesn’t hurt to yield a bit, as long as we are not deceiving ourselves too greatly.”
“A queer thing happens to me whenever I am all through with one piece of work, and I have wondered if it was common to all writers. Before I go to work on something else, I drop into the most terrific despair. It has always been so … Then when the new work takes hold of my mind, nothing exists but the necessity for working it out.”
“Writing is agony. I stay at my typewriter for eight hours every day when I’m working and keep as free as possible from all distractions for the rest of the day. I aim to do six pages a day but I’m satisfied with three. Often there are only a few lines to show.”
“I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing.”
“Women always worry about the things that men forget; men always worry about the things women remember.”
