Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Florida Folklife Writer
This paper examines Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings as a Florida folklife writer whose novels and autobiographical works offer a rare window into rural life in Alachua County, Florida, during the 1930s. It surveys her major works — including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Yearling and the autobiographical Cross Creek — and situates them within the social and economic history of the region. The paper also addresses the racial dynamics of the Jim Crow era as they shaped Rawlings's relationships and writing, drawing on the memoir of her maid, Idella Parker, to explore how Rawlings navigated racial attitudes and friendships in a deeply segregated society.
- Introduction: History Through Personal Lives: Why lived experience enriches historical understanding
- Rawlings's Life and Major Works: Biography, bibliography, and Pulitzer Prize career
- Alachua County: Social and Economic Context: Post-Civil War economy, industry, and the Depression
- Florida Cracker Culture and the Great Depression: Cracker identity, dialect writing, and Depression hardship
- Race, the Jim Crow Era, and Rawlings's Attitudes: Segregation laws and their impact on Rawlings's writing
- Rawlings's Relationships Across the Color Line: Parker memoir reveals complex racial dynamics
- Conclusion: Rawlings's Contribution to Historical Understanding: Rawlings's lasting value as a historical source
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What makes this paper effective
- It grounds literary analysis in historical context, using Alachua County's economic and social history to explain the world Rawlings depicted.
- It incorporates primary source quotations — from Idella Parker's memoir and Rawlings's own letters — to move beyond summary and into evidence-based argument.
- It handles a sensitive topic (racism and racial attitudes) with nuance, distinguishing between conscious prejudice and culturally conditioned behavior.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the use of a literary figure as a historical source. Rather than treating Rawlings's novels purely as fiction, the writer reads them as documentary evidence of 1930s Florida life — an approach that mirrors how historians use memoir, journalism, and local-color writing to reconstruct past cultures. The extended engagement with Parker's memoir as a counterpoint to Rawlings's own perspective also shows how to integrate multiple voices to build a more complete picture.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a methodological claim about the value of lived-experience sources for historical study, then surveys Rawlings's biography and bibliography. It broadens outward to regional history before narrowing back to cultural specifics (cracker identity, Depression-era hardship, Jim Crow law). The final sections use Parker's memoir and Rawlings's letters to examine race relations personally and conclude with an overall assessment of Rawlings's historical value.
Introduction: History Through Personal Lives
When pursuing the study of history, it is important not to fall into the habit of reciting dates and facts alone. If memorization were the true substance of historical study, it would offer little more than a catalog of events. To truly understand why people of a certain era behaved as they did, one must enter their personal daily lives and come to know the passions and struggles that shaped them. It is rare to gain such a glimpse into lives so distant from our own. This is precisely the kind of valuable information that the works of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings provide.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is one of the most celebrated Florida writers of all time. She loved the folklife of Alachua County, Florida, and has been compared to Henry David Thoreau in her literary style. Her works offer a behind-the-scenes look at the Florida backcountry of the 1930s. The people of the area were known as "crackers," and her writing gives readers a glimpse of a life seldom seen by anyone outside the local community.
Rawlings's Life and Major Works
Marjorie Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1918. She moved to New York to pursue a career in journalism, but in 1928 she left the city to settle in Cross Creek, Florida. She divorced her first husband in 1933 and married Norton Baskin, a St. Augustine businessman, in 1941. In 1939, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Yearling [University, 2001].
In 1930, Rawlings wrote Jacob's Ladder, in which a young Florida couple flees for their lives and struggles to find their way in a land filled with greed, bad luck, and dishonesty. In South Moon Under (1933), Rawlings introduces a Florida Cracker who becomes a moonshiner and kills the cousin who betrays him. Golden Apples (1935) follows an Englishman who finds himself in nineteenth-century Florida.
In 1938, Rawlings wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Yearling, which explores a boy's initiation into manhood in the Florida wilderness. In the story, the boy is forced to kill his pet deer after it destroys the family's crops. When the Whippoorwill is a collection of short stories published in 1940. Cross Creek, written in 1942, has often been compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden. It is an autobiographical work in which Rawlings recounts her adaptation to life at Cross Creek; she later released a companion volume titled Cross Creek Cookery. In 1953, her last novel, The Sojourner, was published — the only book she wrote with a Northern setting. In 1955, her only children's novel, The Secret River, was released. It tells the story of a young girl and her dog who journey to a secret Florida river to find fish for her father's struggling fish market [Salling, 2001].
When Rawlings first saw Cross Creek, she fell in love with it. She was drawn to the rural setting among towns called Hawthorne, Orange Lake, and Micanopy. In 1928, Marjorie and Charles Rawlings purchased 72 acres and began renovating an old farmhouse. There she found peace and wove the landscape and the people she encountered into descriptive and accurate stories that offer a glimpse of that era seldom seen elsewhere [Salling, 2001].
Alachua County: Social and Economic Context
The area that Rawlings wrote about — Alachua County, Florida — is located in the center of the state. After the Civil War, the county experienced martial law, Republican rule, and an influx of freed slaves. The post-war period brought economic prosperity: the Union Academy for African Americans and the East Florida Seminary for whites were both established, and cotton and vegetable crops were the area's primary products during Reconstruction [Pickard, 2001].
The following 25 years saw the development of a citrus and phosphate industry that gave the local economy a solid base. The county's central location made it a natural candidate for a major railway line, and these industries survived well into the twentieth century. World War I and a cotton blight ultimately brought those prosperous days to an end. In 1905, Gainesville was chosen as the site of the University of Florida.
By the 1930s, the University had become the most important industry in the local economy and helped the region survive both the land boom collapse of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s [Pickard, 2001]. It is the Alachua County of the 1930s that gave Rawlings her perspective and the backdrop for her work.
Rawlings wrote as a housewife and described her life as such. She offered perspectives on subjects ranging from cooking and gardening to motherhood, friendship, and neighborly relations — themes she explored across a series of poems. These works provide a personal and intimate window into the history of the era [Tarr, 1997].
Conclusion: Rawlings's Contribution to Historical Understanding
These glimpses of life during the Great Depression offer better insight into where we have been, in the hope that we can gain better understanding of where we are going. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings made a generous contribution to our understanding of this time period, capturing through her fiction and autobiography the textures of daily life, cultural struggle, and human relationships in a corner of Florida that might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
Works Cited
Kennedy, Stetson. A Florida Treasure Hunt. Florida Folklife Home. Date unknown. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/flwpahtml/ffpres01.html. Accessed March 2002.
Parker, Idella. Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' Perfect Maid. University Press of Florida, 1992. ISBN 0-8130-1706-8.
Pickard, Ben. Guide to Alachua County History, Places and Names. Alachua County Historic Trust. Matheson Museum, Inc., 2001.
Salling, Rusty. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' Major Works. The Hippodrome State Theatre, Gainesville, FL, 2001. http://hipp.gator.net/mkrworks.html. Accessed March 2002.
Tarr, Rodger L. Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Songs of a Housewife. University Press of Florida, 1997. ISBN 0-8130-1491-3.
Tarr, Rodger L. Short Stories of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. University Press of Florida, 1994. ISBN 0-8130-1252-X.
The Jackson Sun. "The Jim Crow Laws." Jackson, Tennessee, 2002. Accessed March 2002.
[University]. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Correspondence and Manuscripts. George A. Smathers Libraries Special Collection. Updated October 12, 2001. Accessed March 2002.
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