The Yearling

Florida is a notoriously difficult region to capture in words, and writers often reduce the state to a swampland full of alligators and sand, or a mecca for theme park enthusiasts and retirees. However, at one point, Florida existed as a frontier just as wild and untamed as the western part of the United States, and Rawlings sought to show her readers this side of the southernmost state. Through her regionalist writing about central Florida, Rawlings brings a corner of the state to life that was previously unknown. Referred to as “Florida’s Steinbeck,” Rawlings focused her work on those who worked the land. Her works give readers a glimpse of Florida before urbanization, and bring to life its wildlife and lakes. Rawlings’s novels South Moon Under and The Yearling in particular capture the innocence of the untouched wilderness (Allen, Greg. “On Location: The Central Florida of ‘the Yearling’.” NPR, 21 July 2011).

Like many Florida residents, Rawlings was a transplant. Born in Washington DC, she developed a love of the outdoors while living on her father’s small dairy farm. After living in Wisconsin and Kentucky, Rawlings and her husband settled in New York where they both worked in publishing. Though she lived in a large metropolis, stories of agrarian life fascinated her and after a trip to central Florida, she became enamored with the culture, climate, and tranquility of the region. Using inheritance money, Rawlings purchased an orange grove near Cross Creek, Florida, and hoped to live off its profits while she dedicated her time to writing about the people and landscape of her new home. She immersed herself in the new culture and took notes on not just the animals and landscape, but also the people and the local color of the region, making her prose engrossing and vibrant.

Rawlings began writing articles and stories for the local newspaper about the “crackers,” or white people of English or Scottish descent, who migrated to Florida from places like Georgia and West Virginia in search of a warmer climate. Using dialect and slang, she captured the essence of the hardships that accompany life in the area known as the “Big Scrub,” which became the setting for her most famous novel The Yearling. The area doesn’t resemble most people’s image of Florida. Densely packed with trees, teeming with wildlife, and situated between two rivers, the “Big Scrub” is an Eden-like wilderness that is now part of the Ocala National Forest. A real-life couple named Calvin and Mary Long, who lived with their children in a remote area of the scrub called Pat’s Island, inspired Rawlings’s Baxter family and their fictional home of Baxter’s Island. When MGM began producing the 1945 film adaptation of The Yearling, Rawlings insisted they use locations true to the original setting and marked places throughout the scrub where she envisioned certain scenes taking place (Garner, Dwight “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a Novelist Who Went on a Quest for an Authentic Life.” The New York Times, 10 May 2021).

The immense popularity of The Yearling brought Rawlings into the spotlight, but her work did not come without criticism. In 1943, Rawlings’s neighbor Zelma Cason sued her for libel, claiming Rawlings’s memoir Cross Creek portrayed her in a negative light. Others also disagreed with the way Rawlings characterized the people of the region, particularly her references to Black members of her community. Rawlings frequently used racist language in her personal life and memoir, referring to Black women employed in her home and workers in her orange grove by a racial slur. Schools discontinued the use of The Yearling in classrooms due to its use of the slur. Despite the controversy, critics still praise Rawlings for writing about Florida with a richness that captures the state’s wild nature—one that captivated audiences and inspired new understanding of the often-misunderstood region (Garner, Dwight. “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a Novelist Who Went on a Quest for an Authentic Life.” The New York Times, 10 May 2021).