If I had to pick only one book to hold up as The Great Floridian Novel I would pick Rawlings’ The Yearling, which, incidentally, also won a Pulitzer for fiction in 1939. She made a career writing about the Florida Crackers and also penned South Moon Under and the autobiographical Cross Creek, both very good.
Born August 8, 1986 in Washington D.C. and wanting to be nothing but a writer from a young age, Rawlings wrote for a number of publications before moving to Florida in 1928, in which she and her husband purchased 72 acres of orange grove fields in what is now known as Cross Creek, FL, a place in which she made famous through her writings based on the Florida Crackers she met and lived with there. Her husband, not liking rural Florida, divorced and left the same year they moved there.
Rawlings became famous after publishing The Yearling in 1938 and especially after the MGM movie came out in 1946. Rawlings passed in 1953 in St. Augustine.
As always, don’t forget that I have a conveniently located amazon link right here in case you decide you would like to order one of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ masterpieces.
And now the list!
Blood of My Blood (1928)
South Moon Under (1933)
Golden Apples (1935)
The Yearling (1938)
When the Whippoorwill (1940)
Cross Creek (1942)
Cross Creek Cookery (1942)
The Sojourner (1953)
The Secret River (1955)
She also wrote 33 short stories that are floating around out there. To my knowledge nobody has compiled them yet into a collection. Hopefully, it will come to pass soon!
