Cross Creek certainly resembles Thoreau's Walden (1854) in its depiction of an educated person withdrawing to a simple, rural place in order to think and write. Too, there is close interest in plants and animals, and a conscious pleasure in the simplicity and honesty of things rural and agrarian. Rawlings mentions Thoreau in Cross Creek, and Bigelow finds close similarities between the two books. Like Walden, Cross Creek may be seen as part of a vast tradition of "rural withdrawal" literature going back to Virgil. Additionally, although Rawlings may not have been familiar with the book, William Bartram's Travels (1791) is an important early literary expression of the concept of Florida as a rather benignly luxuriant, Edenic place filled with interesting plants and animals.