Although Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is best known as the author of The Yearling (1938) and thus--inaccurately--as a writer of children's books, her other novels deserve consideration as serious fiction. So do her short stories, eleven of which were collected in When the Whippoorwill --(1940). Three others were included by Julia Scribner Bigham in The Marjorie Rawlings Reader (1956). Still others, also worth reading, remain uncollected.

Marjorie Kinnan was born on 8 August 1896 in Washington, D.C., where her father, Arthur, worked for the Patent Office. She did not become a writer by accident. As a child, she read Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens and also liked to tell stories to other children; by the age of six she was writing for the children's pages of area newspapers. At age eleven she won a two-dollar prize for a story, which was published in the Washington Post, and at fifteen a seventy-five...