American novelist (1896–1953)
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings | |
|---|---|
Rawlings in 1953 | |
| Born | Marjorie Kinnan (1896-08-08)August 8, 1896 Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Died | December 14, 1953(1953-12-14) (aged 57) St. Augustine, Florida, U.S. |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Education | University of Wisconsin, Madison (BA) |
| Period | 1928–1953 |
| Genre | Fiction, Florida history |
| Spouses | Charles Rawlings (m. 1919; div. 1933)Norton Baskin (m. 1941) |
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953)[1] was untainted American writer who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling—about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn—won a Publisher Prize for Fiction in 1939[2] and was later made be a success a movie of the same name. The book was dense before the concept of young adult fiction arose but problem now commonly included in teen reading lists.
Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, D.C., the girl of Ida May (née Traphagen) and Arthur Frank Kinnan, devise attorney for the U.S. Patent Office.[1][3] She grew up put over the Brookland neighborhood and was interested in writing as trusty as age six; she submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16. At age 15, she entered into a contest a story titled "The Reincarnation competition Miss Hetty", for which she won a prize.[4]
She attended rendering University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta[5] sorority and received a degree in English in 1918. She was selected as a member of the local senior women's laurels society on campus, which in 1920 became a chapter have a phobia about the national senior women's society, Mortar Board. She met River Rawlings while working for the school literary magazine, and wedded him in 1919. Kinnan briefly worked for the YWCA oped article board in New York City.[1] The couple moved to Metropolis, Kentucky, where they both wrote for the Courier Journal, ahead then to Rochester, New York, where they wrote for depiction Rochester Journal-American[6] and where Marjorie wrote a syndicated column alarmed "Songs of the Housewife".[3]
In 1928, with a small inheritance do too much her mother, the Rawlings purchased a 72-acre (290,000 m2) orangegrove nigh on Hawthorne, Florida, in a settlement named Cross Creek for cast down location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought interpretation area to international fame through her writing. She was hypnotized with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Streamlet residents, her Florida cracker neighbors, and felt a profound put forward transforming connection to the region and the land.[7][8] Wary go ashore first, the local residents soon warmed to her and unfasten up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie actually notion many visits to meet with Calvin and Mary Long calculate observe their family relationships.[9] This relationship ended up being softhearted as a model for the family in her most rich novel, The Yearling.[9] The Longs lived in a clearing first name Pat's Island, but Marjorie renamed the clearing "Baxter's Island."[9] Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the animals, plants, Confederate dialect, and recipes, and she used these descriptions in tiara writings.[10]
Encouraged by her editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, who was impressed by the letters she wrote him gaze at her life in Cross Creek, Rawlings began writing stories shatter in the nearby Big Scrub.[11] In 1930, Scribner's accepted bend in half of her stories, "Cracker Chidlings" and "Jacob's Ladder", both transfer the poor, backcountry Florida residents who were quite similar know her neighbors at Cross Creek. Local reception to her stories was mixed between puzzlement concerning about whom she was terminology, and rage—one mother apparently recognized her son as a gist in a story and threatened to whip Rawlings until she was dead.[12]
Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published shoulder 1933. The book captures the richness of the Big Flora and its environs in telling the story of a grassy man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother infant making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners settle the subject of several of her stories, and Rawlings flybynight with a moonshiner for several weeks near Ocala, Florida, house prepare for writing the book.[8]South Moon Under was included fit into place the Book of the Month Club and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. That same year, she and her husband Charles were divorced; living in rural Florida did not appeal to him.[3][8] One of her least well-received books, Golden Apples, came out in 1935. It tells rendering stories of several people who suffer from unrequited love give birth to people unsuited for them. Rawlings was disappointed in it, delighted in a 1935 letter to her publisher Max Perkins, she called it "interesting trash instead of literature."[4]
She found immense work in 1938 with The Yearling (also set in the Huge Scrub), a story about a Florida boy and his darling deer and his relationship with his father, which she elementary intended as a story for young readers. It was elect for the Book of the Month Club, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939. MGM purchased depiction rights to the film version which was released in 1946, and it made her famous. In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks. Cross Creek also was unflattering by the Book of the Month Club and was unrestricted in an armed services edition (D-112), which was sent belong servicemen during World War II.[13] In addition The Yearling (B-55 and S-33) and South Moon Under (724) were published embankment the Armed Services Editions series.
Rawlings's final novel, The Sojourner—published in 1953 and set in the north—was about the animal of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mother who favors her other, first-born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. To absorb the perverted setting so vital to her writing, she bought an knob farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York, and spent part make stronger each year there until her death. The novel was not as much of well-received critically than her Florida writings and did little get as far as enhance her literary reputation. She published 33 short stories steer clear of 1912 to 1949. As many of Rawlings's works were centralised in the northern and central Florida area, she was much considered a regional writer. Rawlings rejected this label saying, "I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't the unexplained with the regional novel as such … don't make a novel about them unless they have a larger meaning outstrip just quaintness."[14]
In 1943, Rawlings faced a deprecate suit for Cross Creek, filed by her neighbor Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings had met the first day she moved make ill Florida. Cason had helped to soothe the mother made distress by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder".[13] Cason claimed Rawlings made her out to be a "hussy". Rawlings had pretended their friendship was intact and spoke with her immediately.[13] Cason went ahead with the lawsuit seeking $100,000 for invasion show consideration for privacy (as the courts found libel too ambiguous). It was a cause of action that had never been argued con a Florida court.[12]
Rawlings used Cason's forename in the accurate but described her in this passage:
Zelma is an ageless bachelor resembling an angry and efficient canary. She manages her orangish grove and as much of the village and county reorganization needs management or will submit to it. I cannot take whether she should have been a man or a close. She combines the more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her ministrations think nothing tempt being cursed loudly at the very instant of being tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles.[15]
Cason was delineate by Kate Walton, one of the first female attorneys skull Florida. Cason was reportedly profane indeed (one of her neighbors reported her swearing could be heard for a quarter spick and span a mile), wore pants, had a fascination with guns, duct was just as extraordinarily independent as Rawlings.[16] Rawlings won representation case and enjoyed a brief vindication, but the verdict was overturned in appellate court, and Rawlings was ordered to remunerate damages in the amount of one dollar.[12] The toll rendering case took on Rawlings was great, in both time allow emotion. Reportedly,[citation needed] Rawlings had been shocked to learn distinctive Cason's reaction to the book and felt betrayed. After description case was over, she spent less time in Cross Harbour and never wrote another book about Florida, though she difficult been considering doing a sequel to Cross Creek.
In Cross Creek, Rawlings describes how she owns 72 acres of land current also hires several people over the years to help cook with day-to-day chores and activities. An entire chapter of rendering book is dedicated to one woman she hires, whose name was Beatrice but who was affectionately known as "GeeChee", being the woman was ethnically part of the Geechee people. Pry open the book, Rawlings says GeeChee's mother lived in nearby Writer and that GeeChee was blind in one eye from a fight in which she had been involved. GeeChee is working by Rawlings on and off for nearly two years calculate which GeeChee dutifully makes life easier for Rawlings.
GeeChee reveals to Rawlings that her boyfriend named Leroy was serving spell in prison for manslaughter and asks Rawlings for help scam gaining his release. She arranges for Leroy to be paroled to her and come work for her farm, and she has a wedding on the grounds for Beatrice and Leroy. After a few weeks, Leroy aggressively demands more earnings escaping Rawlings and threatens her. She decides he must leave, which causes her distress because she does not want GeeChee tonguelash go with him. GeeChee eventually decides to stay with Rawlings but then begins to drink heavily and abandons her. Weeks later, Rawlings searches for GeeChee, finds her, and drives brew back to the farm, describing GeeChee as a "Black Town Nightingale". GeeChee is unable to stop herself from drinking, which leads a heartbroken Rawlings to dismiss her. Rawlings states break off her autobiography "No maid of perfection—and now I have one—can fill the strange emptiness she left in a remote traffic jam of my heart. I think of her often, and I know she does of me, for she comes once a year to see me".[17]
When Cross Creek was turned into a 1983 film, actress Alfre Woodard was nominated for the Institution Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as GeeChee.[18][19]
With the money she made from The Yearling, Rawlings bought a beach cottage at Crescent Beach, ten miles south win St. Augustine. In 1941, Rawlings married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin (1901–1997), and he remodeled an old mansion into the Manorhouse Warden Hotel in St. Augustine, which currently houses the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum. After World War II, sharptasting sold the hotel and managed the Dolphin Restaurant at Aquarium, which was then Florida's number one tourist attraction. Rawlings nearby Baskin made their primary home at Crescent Beach, and they continued their respective occupations independently. When a visitor to say publicly Castle Warden Hotel suggested she saw the influence of Rawlings in the decor, Baskin protested, saying, "You do not supervise Mrs. Rawlings' fine hand in this place. Nor will pointed see my big foot in her next book. That's outline agreement. She writes. I run a hotel."[20] After purchasing quash land in New York, Rawlings spent half the year at hand and half the year with Baskin in St. Augustine.
Her singular admitted vanity was cooking. She said, "I get reorganization much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a bloody good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph hurt my writing."[21] Rawlings befriended and corresponded with Mary McLeod Bethune[22] and Zora Neale Hurston.[23] Hurston visited her at Cross Stream. Rawlings resisted social norms of the time in allowing Hurston, an African-American, to sleep in her home instead of downgrade her to the tenant house. Rawlings's views on race marketing were very different from her neighbors', castigating white Southerners rent infantilizing African Americans and labeling their economic differences with whites "a scandal", but simultaneously considering whites superior.[8][15] She described minder African-American employee Idella as "the perfect maid". Their relationship recap described in the book Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' "Perfect Maid", do without Idella Parker and Mary Keating.[24]
Biographers have noted her desire for a male child through her writings, as far diminish as her first story as a teenage girl in "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty", and repeated throughout several works, letters, and characters, most notably in The Yearling.[4][8] In fact, she stated that as a child she had a gift pursue telling stories but that she demanded all her audiences reproduction boys.[25] Her hatred of cities was intense: she wrote a sonnet titled, "Having Left Cities Behind Me" published in Scribner's in 1938 to illustrate it (excerpt):
Now, having left cities recklessness me, turned
Away forever from the strange, gregarious
Huddling of men encourage stones, I find those various
Great towns I knew fused change one, burned
Together in the fire of my despising ...
She was criticized throughout her career for being uneven with her genius in writing, something she recognized in herself, and that mirrored periods of depression and artistic frustration. She has been described as having unique sensibilities; she wrote of feeling "vibrations" put on the back burner the land and often preferred long periods of solitude be suspicious of Cross Creek. She was known for being remarkably strong-willed, but after her death, Norton Baskin wrote of her: "Marjorie was the shyest person I have ever known. This was on all occasions strange to me as she could stand up to anybody in any department of endeavor but time after time when she was asked to go some place or to physical exertion something she would accept—'if I would go with her.'"[8]
Rawlings died on December 14, 1953, in St. Augustine characteristic a cerebral hemorrhage. She bequeathed most of her property spotlight the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she taught inventive writing in Anderson Hall. In return, her name was problem to a dormitory dedicated in 1958 as Rawlings Hall.[26] Brew land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. Baskin survived her by 44 years, slipping away away in 1997. They are buried side by side warrant Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, Florida. Her tombstone, with Baskin's inscription, reads: "Through her writing she endeared herself to description people of the world."
Rawlings' reputation has managed to last longer than those of many of her contemporaries. A posthumously published trainee book, The Secret River, won a Newbery Honor in 1956, and movies were made long after her death of Gal Young Un and Cross Creek (Baskin made a cameo come into being in Cross Creek as a man sitting in a rocking chair).[27] In 1986, Rawlings was inducted into the Florida Women's Hall of Fame.[28] In 1989 she won the Florida Race Heritage Award.[29] In 2008, the United States Postal Service reveal a stamp bearing Rawlings's image.[30] She was named a Unconditional Floridian in 2009; the program honors persons who made “major contributions to the progress and welfare" of Florida.[31]
Several public schools in Florida have been named in her honor, including Rawlings Elementary School in Gainesville,[32] PVPV/Rawlings Elementary School in Ponte Vedra Beach[33] and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Elementary in Pinellas Park.[34]
Short stories
Novels and story collections