The Life She Wished to Live

I went into this biography only somewhat familiar with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings--mostly from the movie version of The Yearling and the movie Cross Creek based on her life. As I read, my interest was held and then I was riveted. By the end, I was moved and a fan.

Rawlings was one of the 1930s writers whose career was benefited by Max Perkins of Scribner, the legendary editor who worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. I had read the biography Max Perkins by A. Scott Berg--forty-plus years ago!--but did not recall Rawlings.

I spent my teen years reading 20th c writers, including those Perkins mentored, but I don't remember finding women writers listed on the 'greats.' Where was Rawlings? Likely, relegated to the children's section, represented by The Yearling.

Rawlings's mother had hoped for more from life. She determined her daughter would achieve what she had not. When no musical ability was displayed, but Marjorie won a prize for a story, her mother supported and pushed her into writing.

After college, Rawlings became a hack writer and journalist until she felt ready to assume her life's real work as a writer.

She and her husband, also a writer, purchased a Florida orange grove in a backwater community, setting up in a ramshackle house without electricity or plumbing.

Running a business took much of their energy and time and money, but the Cracker and African American neighbors also gave her material for her work.

Rawlings research brought her to live with neighbors to experience their lives, and she went on crocodile and snake hunts.

Rawling's life held many disappointments and challenges. Her first marriage failed, her husband jealous of her success. She struggled with alcohol use and continual health concerns. Her personal relationships were tested, including an extended lawsuit. She suffered from doubt. She also achieved the Pulitzer Prize and a second marriage with a supporting and loving husband.

I had moments of discomfort with Rawling's language of white supremacy, referencing her African American friends and servants by what we today would consider derogatory terms, but which represented typical white mores at that time.

McCutchan takes readers on a journey into Rawling's transformation from accepting her inherited values to becoming involved with Zora Neale Hurston and raising her voice for equal rights.

Rawlings also became involved with environmental groups.

A study in contrasts, Rawlings could tap into her society background, was friends with writers and publisher's daughters, or be bawdy and rowdy, toting a gun on a hunt. She even went into the scrub wearing a silk nightgown to rescue an animal. I loved her esteem for Thomas Wolfe and her heartbreak over his early loss before he could reach his artistic maturity. Like so many writers who came out of the 1920s, she struggled with alcohol dependency.

This is terrific biography.

I received a free egalley from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1938 novel The Yearling, a coming-of-age story about a young boy growing up in central Florida and his relationship with an orphaned fawn. In it, as in most of her writing, Rawling portrays the cultural traditions and speech patterns of the “Crackers,” a community of poor whites living in central Florida’s rural landscape of scrub, swampland, and citrus groves.

In Anne McCutchan’s poignant and well-researched new biography The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the author points out that Rawlings was an unlikely choice to become a major voice in southern literature. Raised in Washington DC, educated in Wisconsin, and then employed in New York, Rawlings did not move to Florida until she was an adult. When Rawlings and her first husband first visited the state in 1928, they were “captivated by rural Florida’s beauty,” as McCutchan writes, where residents were “living frontier lives on what they found, grew, or created from their wild surroundings.” The couple decided to purchase a citrus grove and simple farmhouse in Cross Creek, a remote spot they hoped would provide them with a peaceful and inexpensive place to write. Rawlings immediately felt at home, and that sense of place fueled her writing. Her move to Florida led her, as her biographer says, to a “deepening desire to create serious literature” instead of the “hackwork for city newspapers” that had paid the bills in New York.

Complete Review forthcoming in Deep South Magazine.