Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan (1896-1953), was an American novelist who wrote about the conflict between people and nature in the Florida backwoods. In 1928, Rawlings gave up a journalism career to settle on a farm in Cross Creek, Florida. Her difficult life there gave her the setting and theme for her novels. Her best-known work, The Yearling, won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The novel is set in rural Florida in the 1870’s. It tells the story of a 12-year-old boy whose father must kill the boy’s pet fawn because the animal was eating the family’s scanty crops.
Marjorie Kinnan was born in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 8, 1896, and married Charles Rawlings in 1919. Her other novels include South Moon Under (1933) and Golden Apples (1935). Her stories were collected in When the Whippoorwill (1940). Rawlings humorously described her life in Florida in Cross Creek (1942). She died on Dec. 14, 1953. Rawlings’s first novel, Blood of My Blood, was published in 2002, 74 years after she wrote it.
