Publisher's Synopsis
A collection of literary work that shows the artistic development of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author
From herfirst 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.
