A collection of literary work that shows the artistic development of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author
From her first poems and stories to her finely crafted essays as a newspaper and feature writer to the gathering brilliance that began at the outset of her Florida Period, highlighted by the Pulitzer Prize for The Yearling in 1939, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings became, in the words of Margaret Mitchell, America’s “born perfect storyteller.” Arguing that Rawlings has been underestimated and underappreciated as a great American writer, Rodger Tarr and Brent Kinser present Rawlings’s emergence and maturation as an artist. This collection brings together for the first time the work that contributed to her once stellar position as a hero of American letters.
Rawlings’s childhood publications in the Washington Post and McCall’s magazine reveal a budding Romantic if not an emerging Transcendentalist determined to pursue humanity’s relationship with nature. As a young storyteller Rawlings had a compelling interest in fairytales, marked by a sense of the comedic and the sentimental, and always the moral. Many of her early stories and poems, especially those written while she was a student at the University of Wisconsin, also reflect her developing feminist spirit, an interest that she continued to pursue as a feature writer for newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, and Rochester, New York.
Like many writers, Rawlings was self-critical. She was particularly aware of writing as a discipline and as an adult was prone to dismiss her early work as overly wrought. However, as her mature work demonstrates, she owed a great deal to the skills learned in her development as an artist. Rawlings knew that successful writing owed less to inspiration than to hard work, a lesson she experienced repeatedly during the writing of her stories and novels under the guiding hand of her celebrated editor Maxwell E. Perkins. This collection of early work, college writing, newspaper pieces, and stories of life in Florida is an intimate glimpse at an important writer mastering her craft.