Years later, writing in her semi-autobiographical book
Cross Creek (1942), Rawlings would recall the rural summers she and her brother Arthur enjoyed as some of her happiest times. Frank and Ida Kinnan were loving parents, but from the beginning young Marjorie enjoyed a special relationship with her father. She was a voracious reader and loved to write. By age six Marjorie was already scribbling stories. In 1907, at age eleven, she won a $2 prize in a
Washington Post short story contest, and during her junior year at Western High School in Washington, she won a $75 second- place prize in a
McCall's literary competition.
Marjorie Kinnan's idyllic childhood ended abruptly in 1913, when her father died from a kidney infection. "The loss of her father was the first deep tragedy and greatest betrayal in [her] young life," biographer Elizabeth Silverthorne writes in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek. "She remembered always 'the great and terrible stillness' that seemed to cover the earth on the day he died." Arthur Kinnan had been friends with prominent Washington politicians, one of whom was Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette.
This is a free page. This page contains 179 words. This
biography contains 2,584 words (approx. 9 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Access Pass.
