Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

As she answered the door, she held in her hand a copy of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling's "The Yearling." "That's a great book," she remarked, as she laid the volume on the library table in the front hall — "So true to the 'cracker' life and customs. And I remember the storm she tells about."

"Ruby Beach,"
interview with Mrs. Eleanor Scull, Jacksonville, Florida,
Rose Shepherd, interviewer, April 11, 1939.
American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
Carl Van Vechten, photographer,
January 18, 1953.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten, 1932-1964

Journalist, short-story writer, and novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born on August 8, 1896, in Washington, D.C. Rawlings is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling (1938), the story of young Jody Baxter's coming of age in the big scrub country which is now the Ocala National Forest in Florida.

Rawlings began her career as a journalist, working for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Rochester Journal.  In 1926 she began writing a daily poetry column, "Songs of a Housewife," for the Rochester Times-Union.  The column was soon syndicated by United Features and ran in approximately fifty newspapers.

Rawlings settled at Cross Creek, near Gainesville, Florida, in 1928, in order to write fiction. Cross Creek, published in 1942, tells of her enchantment with this part of rural Florida. Her association with Cross Creek continued until her death in 1953 at the age of fifty-seven.

• Search on the term writer in the Today in History Archive to read more about the lives of American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Thornton Wilder, and Langston Hughes. Search on Florida to read about topics such as colonial Florida and Florida's secession.

  
  Sunset on the Ocklawaha [i.e. Oklawaha],
  William Henry Jackson, photographer,
  c1899.
  Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

• Search on Florida in American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 to find more recollections of Florida during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Read, for example, the narrative of Julien Philip Benjamin who was born in Ocala, Florida.
• Learn more about Florida. See the Pathfinder Search Guide for Florida prepared by the Learning Page, or search the American Memory collections on the keyword Florida.
• The collection Florida Folklife from the WPA Collections, 1937-1942 is a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting cultures throughout Florida. It includes children's songs, blues, and a wide variety of other materials gathered by Works Progress Administration (WPA) workers. Browse the collection by Geographic Location to find material from a number of locations throughout the state. Browse the Audio Title Index to find such titles as Collier in the Scrub, El caballo de palo, and Give Me a Ranch Down in Florida. 
• View the Library of Congress online exhibition Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During WWII to learn about the emergence of women journalists in American society.

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