Marjorie Kinnan

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) was an American novelist and short-story writer best known for *The Yearling* (1938). Born in Washington, D.C., she later lived in rural Florida, where the landscape and lives of “cracker” communities strongly influenced her fiction. Rawlings wrote both adult and young-adult works, often focusing on family, hardship, and the natural world. *The Yearling*, a coming-of-age story set in Florida, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 and became her most enduring book. She also wrote *Cross Creek* (1942), a memoir of her life in Florida. Rawlings died in 1953.