Abstract: From her early Florida sketches, critics identified Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings as a local color writer. Born and educated in Wisconsin and raised near Washington, D.C., she spent second half of her life on an orange grove in Florida, a place which nurtured her finest writing. Known primarily as author of children's story The Yearling, Rawlings also deserves critical attention for her collection of non-fiction essays, Cross Creek, as well as for her short stories and novels set in Florida's Big Scrub. Rawlings always objected to pigeon-holing of her art as regional, and in a lecture to National Council of Teachers of English in 1939 she presented her distinction between regional writing and regional literature. Writing that exploits quaint customs or local color betrays people it represents, she maintained. In contradistinction, comes from an inner reverence, love and understanding of people and a place. Using these criteria, she said, there is little regional of South, and she considered a Southern label somewhat deprecating. According to Rawlings, Northerners read works such as Fanny Kemble's Diary and Caldwell's Tobacco Road for sentimental divertissement. To subtitle a book `A Tale of South,' she argued, to guarantee a closer attention than would be given a similarly mediocre story laid in Buffalo (Regional 382-83). Rawlings judged Ellen Glasgow the creator of only unmistakeable regional of in her generation; three regional writers she considered very close to literature were Julia Peterkin, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and Zora Neale Hurston (Regional 386-87). Although she felt like an intellectual outsider for her first decade in rural South, Rawlings found a rich source of natural material for her writing when she moved to Florida in 1928. Scribner's published four of her Florida essays and short stories beginning with Chidlings and Jacob's Ladder in February and April 1931. Rawlings's first novel, South Moon Under (1933), also celebrated Florida Big Scrub, and Maxwell Perkins, her editor at Scribner's, encouraged her to write a boys' book about Florida river travel, guns and dogs. However, she next wrote Golden Apples (1935), a contrived novel about an Englishman exiled to an orange grove. Her command of Cracker dialect and natural locale enhanced The Yearling (1938), story of a boy growing to manhood in Florida, and this novel was commercial and artistic success that Perkins predicted. Following their policy of issuing a collection of short stories after an author's successful novel, Scribner's published When Whippoorwill in 1940 and Cross Creek, a collection of nonfiction sketches, followed in 1942. In Cross Creek Rawlings portrays ecologically interdependent community of human and animal neighbors at her orange grove, mixing humorous anecdotes, serious meditation, character sketches, nature description, talk about food, superstitions, and seasons of year (Bigelow 123). In Hyacinth Drift, most personal of Cross Creek's twenty-three essays, Rawlings confronts and conquers her personal fears on a river voyage, and, through finding her way back home geographically, she confirms her love for land. Her themes in Cross Creek are recognition of home, healing power of nature, and oneness of creation. It is Rawlings's love of her material that makes Cross Creek a book of instead of strictly regional writing. She respects her neighbors for their love and loyalty to their land, which provides so sparse a living from depleted farmland, disappearing game animals, and timbered woods. Unwilling to leave land they love, they make moonshine because it provides only income that will allow them to stay. Even though backwoods people Rawlings portrays in Our Daily Bread in Cross Creek do not respect Federal game laws, they are aware of natural limits and respect creatures' rights. …
Publication Year: 1994
Publication Date: 1994-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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