Rawlings had come to know and greatly admire the Florida "crackers" who inhabited the great scrub country of northern Florida — the area roughly identical with the present Ocala National Forest. In South Moon Under as much as any of her writing, Rawlings tried to show these people as they really were. She saw them as honest, living close to their environment and surviving often by the thinnest of margins, but with a remarkably resilient and positive outlook on life. Although some of her earlier tales of crackers had brought a protest from the editor of the Ocala newspaper that such people had never existed, it is clear that she had simply paid more attention to his region than he had; her works are now accepted as very accurate pictures of the time and place, and have served as documentary evidence for scholarly studies on cracker...