Маржори Киннан Ролингс: Американдық жазушының өмірі мен шығармалары

American novelist (1896–1953)

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American writer who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same name. The book was written before the concept of young adult fiction arose, but is now commonly included in teen reading lists.

Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, D. C., the daughter of Ida May (née Traphagen) and Arthur Frank Kinnan, an attorney for the U. S. Patent Office. She grew up in the Brookland neighborhood and was interested in writing as early as age six, and submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16. At age 15, she entered into a contest a story titled "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty", for which she won a prize. She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and received a degree in English in 1918. She was selected as a member of the local senior women's honor society on campus, which in 1920 became a chapter of the national senior women's society, Mortar Board. She met Charles Rawlings while working for the school literary magazine, and married him in 1919. Kinnan briefly worked for the YWCA editorial board in New York City. and where Marjorie wrote a syndicated column called "Songs of the Housewife". Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie actually made many visits to meet with Calvin and Mary Long to observe their family relationships. This relationship ended up being used as a model for the family in her most successful novel, The Yearling.

Encouraged by her editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, who was impressed by the letters she wrote him about her life in Cross Creek, Rawlings began writing stories set in the nearby Big Scrub. In 1930, Scribner's accepted two of her stories, "Cracker Chidlings" and "Jacob's Ladder", both about the poor, backcountry Florida residents who were quite similar to her neighbors at Cross Creek. Local reception to her stories was mixed between puzzlement concerning whom she was writing about, and rage, since one mother apparently recognized her son as a subject in a story and threatened to whip Rawlings until she was dead. Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of the Big Scrub and its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several weeks near Ocala, Florida, to prepare for writing the book. In addition to Cross Creek (D 112), The Yearling (B 55 and S 33) and South Moon Under (724) were also published in the Armed Services Editions series. Rawlings's final novel, The Sojourner, published in 1953 and set in a northern setting, was about the life of a man and his relationship to his family: a difficult mother who favors her other, first born son and his relationship to this absent older brother. To absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York, and spent part of each year there until her death. The novel was less well received critically than her Florida writings and did little to enhance her literary reputation. She published 33 short stories from 1912 to 1949. As many of Rawlings's works were centered in the North and Central Florida area, she was often considered a regional writer. Rawlings herself rejected this label saying, "I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't hold with the regional novel as such don't make a novel about them unless they have a larger meaning than just quaintness."

In 1943, Rawlings faced a libel suit for Cross Creek, filed by her neighbor Zelma Cason, whom Rawlings had met the first day she moved to Florida. Cason had helped to soothe the mother made upset by her son's depiction in "Jacob's Ladder".</blockquote>

Cason was represented by one of the first female lawyers in Florida, Kate Walton. Cason was reportedly profane indeed (one of her neighbors reported her swearing could be heard for a quarter of a mile), wore pants, had a fascination with guns, and was just as extraordinarily independent as Rawlings herself. Rawlings won the case and enjoyed a brief vindication, but the verdict was overturned in appellate court and Rawlings was ordered to pay damages in the amount of one dollar. When Cross Creek was turned into a 1983 film, actress Alfre Woodard was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as GeeChee.