Overview

A collection of literary work that shows the artistic development of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author From her first poems and stories to her finely crafted essays as a newspaper and feature writer to the gathering brilliance that began at the outset of her Florida Period, highlighted by the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling in 1939, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings became, in the words of Margaret Mitchell, America's ""born perfect storyteller."" Arguing that Rawlings has been underestimated and underappreciated as a great American writer, Rodger Tarr and Brent Kinser present Rawlings's emergence and maturation as an artist. This collection brings together for the first time the work that contributed to her once stellar position as a hero of American letters. Rawlings's childhood publications in the Washington Post and McCall's magazine reveal a budding Romantic if not an emerging Transcendentalist determined to pursue humanity's relationship with nature. As a young storyteller Rawlings had a compelling interest in fairytales, marked by a sense of the comedic and the sentimental, and always the moral. Many of her early stories and poems, especially those written while she was a student at the University of Wisconsin, also reflect her developing feminist spirit, an interest that she continued to pursue as a feature writer for newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York. Like many writers, Rawlings was self-critical. She was particularly aware of writing as a discipline and as an adult was prone to dismiss her early work as overly wrought. However, as her mature work demonstrates, she owed a great deal to the skills learned in her development as an artist. Rawlings knew that successful writing owed less to inspiration than to hard work, a lesson she experienced repeatedly during the writing of her stories and novels under the guiding hand of her celebrated editor Maxwell E. Perkins. This collection of early work, college writing, newspaper pieces, and stories of life in Florida is an intimate glimpse at an important writer mastering her craft.

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9780813081472

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Reviews

“Reading through the material chronologically allows one to experience the blooming and sharpening of a writer’s voice. . . . Present[s] a complete picture of Rawlings’s development.”—Library Journal “A wonderful volume of lost writings that will delight literary scholars and general readers alike. . . . Americanists, Florida historians, feminists, nature lovers, cooks, and admirers of great authors will certainly want to find a place in their library.”—Bloomsbury Review “This book effectively traces the ways that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings built upon her previous experiences in developing as a writer. Tarr and Kinser were comprehensive and thorough in their careful and diligent collection of Rawlings’ work.”—Florida Historical Quarterly

Author Information

Rodger L. Tarr is university distinguished professor, emeritus, at Illinois State University. He is the editor of Short Stories by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and The Private Marjorie: The Love Letters of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings to Norton S. Baskin. Brent E. Kinser is assistant professor of English at Western Carolina University. With Tarr, he is coeditor of Marge and Julia: The Correspondence between Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Julia Scribner Bigham and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Cross Creek Sampler: A Book of Quotations.

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