It’s the birthday of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953), best known for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Yearling (1938), about a boy in backwoods Florida who adopts a fawn, and for chronicling the lives of rural Floridians in the Cross Creek/Florida scrub region.

Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., where her father worked for the U.S. Patent Office, but the family spent time on a farm in Maryland and Rawlings spent summers on her mother’s family farm in Michigan. When her father died in 1913, the family moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and Rawlings graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1918. She married Charles Rawlings the next year and worked as a journalist for the next ten years while trying to launch a career, unsuccessfully, as a fiction writer.

In 1928, the Rawlingses bought an orange grove in northern Florida and Rawlings basically fell in love with all the swamps, Spanish moss, panthers, reptiles, raccoons, etc., because what’s *not* to love about swamps Spanish moss reptiles etc., and she probably should have married it because she was soon available, for a time there: Charles did *not* love rural life in Florida and they divorced. Rawlings began to immerse herself in the local culture to the point of moving in with a Cracker family who taught her all about moonshining, stalking deer at night with lights, hunting squirrel, and all the fun, semi-skeevy activities that make one want to leave the green lawns and boring old indoor plumbing of suburban life and live in a swamp. If you’re into that sort of thing. Which Charles, as I said, was not.

Rawlings soon found her voice and began writing vignettes about the area and eventually got the attention of the great editor Maxwell Perkins (all hail Maxwell Perkins!), and the upshot was the publication of her first novel, South Moon Under (1933), Golden Apples (1935; it almost won the Pulitzer), and The Yearling. (Like I’ve already said, The Yearling is about a boy and his deer, so I’ll just add that the book has been called “bittersweet.” So. No spoilers, but maybe don’t get fond of the deer.)

Rawlings married her old friend Norton Sanford Baskin (maybe rural Florida was no longer available) in 1941, and in 1943 she got embroiled in a lawsuit brought by her friend Zelma Cason, who claimed that Rawlings’ 1942 book Cross Creek had invaded her privacy. After five stressful years, the Florida high court ruled against Rawlings but fined her only $1 plus court costs. In 1942, Rawlings also became BFFs with Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937), who also began working with Maxwell Perkins. Then Perkins died in 1947 and Rawlings was devastated and frankly—ask any writer—literature hasn’t been the same since. Anyway. Rawlings managed to publish her southern Michigan novel, The Sojourner, in 1953, and was working on a biography of Ellen Glasgow when she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died. She was buried in Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, Florida, and in 2009 was named a Great Floridian by the state she loved so much.

Have a splendid Tuesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.