Life was not easy. Summers were brutally hot, mosquitoes swarmed, and farming was unpredictable. Yet many residents valued the independence and closeness to nature that Cross Creek provided. It was into this rustic world that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings arrived in the late 1920s.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and the Literary Transformation
Rawlings, born in 1896 in Washington, D.C., was a journalist and aspiring writer when she purchased a small orange grove and farmhouse in Cross Creek in 1928. What she found there captivated her imagination: the landscapes, the wildlife, and most of all, the people—fiercely independent Floridians whose lives seemed timeless.
She immersed herself in the community, befriending neighbors, learning to hunt and fish, and writing about her surroundings. Her nonfiction book Cross Creek (1942) described her experiences and observations, painting a vivid picture of life in the hamlet. But her most famous work was The Yearling (1938), a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about a boy and his pet fawn, set in the Florida scrub.
Rawlings’s success brought Cross Creek international fame. Suddenly, the quiet farming community was on the literary map. Visitors began to arrive, curious to see the place Rawlings had described. Though some locals resented the attention, others embraced the recognition. shutdown123