A year after her father died in 1913 and Marjorie had finished high school, her mother, Ida May Traphagen Kinnan, moved with Marjorie and her younger brother, Arthur, to Madison, Wisconsin. There Marjorie majored in English at the university, was active in campus literary life and dramatics, made Phi Beta Kappa her junior year, and graduated in 1918.
In May 1919 she married the writer Charles A. (Chuck) Rawlings, Jr., whom she had known at Wisconsin, and moved with him to Rochester, New York. From 1919 to 1928, she wrote newspaper features, advertising copy, and, starting in 1926, a daily syndicated column for the Rochester Times-Union called "Songs of the Housewife", which consisted of sentimental poetry and was eventually syndicated to fifty other papers. She also tried, unsuccessfully, to publish fiction.
In 1928 the couple made a decision that would revive Marjorie's stalled career as a fiction writer: shortly after vacationing in Florida in 1928, they bought a farm with an orange grove in Cross Creek, near Gainesville, Florida. (Her husband's brothers were already living nearby.) Marjorie greatly preferred rural to city life, and both her marriage and her writing needed revitalizing.
This is a free page. This page contains 174 words. This
biography contains 2,268 words (approx. 8 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Access Pass.
