"Here is Home"

Hello gentle souls, thanks for stopping by. We are well into welcoming fall and it is my favorite season! Harvest, full wood sheds and hay barns, collecting seeds, mulching gardens and finding gratitude in each step of the way. 

We may know Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings from her book The Yearling. I suppose we have all read it or had it as required reading somewhere along the line. I have recently developed an interest in the author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and her independent and wild spirit, prompting me to seek more information about her. This is some of what I discovered. 

Marjorie was born in Washington, D.C. on August 8, 1896. Her love of writing began as a very young child. When she was eleven, the Washington Post published one of her stories, and she won the McCall’s writing contest at sixteen. In 1918, she graduated from the University of Wisconsin and the following year she married Charles A. Rawlings, whom she met while working for the school literary magazine. He was a newspaperman, reporter, and feature writer for the Louisville courier-Journal and the Rochester Journal while he worked on establishing his career as a fiction writer. The couple amicably divorced after fifteen years of marriage.

Marjorie sold a few of her stories during this time but it was not until 1928 when with a small inheritance from her mother, she purchased and moved to a 72 acre orange grove near Cross Creek, in northern Florida, that she began to flourish and find her true literary voice. The farm had 1,600 producing citrus trees, 800 pecan trees, chickens, cows, farm equipment, barn, tenant house and the sprawling eight-room farmhouse. She said from her first visit to that area in Florida; she felt herself attuned to the wild nature of the place and to the people living there. The remoteness of the wilderness in which she lived captivated Marjorie. She filled notebooks with notes and sketches of the local animals, flora and fauna, and recipes. 

Marjorie admitted that her singular vanity was cooking. She said, “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.” Friends who visited her at Cross Creek were Zora Neale Hurston and Mary McLeod Bethune. These American Americans stayed with her, in her own home, not the tenant house, which flew in the face of social norms of the town. 

Marjorie thrived on her orange grove and educated herself on surviving in the semi wild place she lived. She learned about hunting and fishing for her survival and was a huge animal lover, especially dogs. Marjorie became well known for her hospitality and for creating sumptuous feasts for guests. She published her cookbook, Cross Creek Cookery, during that time. She also became quite an activist for the environment and, upon her death, left her home and land to the University of Florida. It is a National Historic Landmark and State Park today. 

Marjorie won a writing contest with Scribner’s for “Jacob’s Ladder.” This win added her to the favorites list of Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins, who was also editor for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. During this time, she wrote two novels, South Moon Under, Golden Apples and The Yearling (later made into a movie). Marjorie had a close relationship with Perkins for seventeen years and partied with many other up-and-coming writers of the time. Sadly, the downside of this was her serious alcohol addiction, which probably attributed to her premature death at age fifty-seven. Her legacy lives on.