Biography Essay

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is known primarily for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling (1938). Most of her fiction and nonfiction deals with poor, backcountry Floridians (called "crackers") and with man's need to be in harmony with his natural environment. Her life in the Florida woods, which furnished her with much of the material that she wrote about so sympathetically, represented a reaction against the urban life she violently detested.

Born on 8 August 1896 and raised in Washington, D.C., Marjorie Kinnan, as early as the age of six, expressed an interest in writing, and for the next decade or so contributed to the children's pages of The Washington Post. At fifteen she won a prize for her story, "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," which she had entered in McCall's Child Authorship Contest. Her father, to whom she had been very close, died in 1913, and the following year she...