Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings may not have been born a Floridian (she came from Washington, D.C.), but after moving to the tiny hamlet of Cross Creek in 1928, she captured the soul of Florida’s landscapes and people like no one else. She immersed herself in rural Cracker life, learning to hunt, fish, garden, and cook alongside her neighbors, and she poured that authenticity into her writing.
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning “The Yearling” to “Cross Creek,” and lesser-known works like “South Moon Under” and “Gal Youngin’,” her stories are more than just descriptions. They are living, breathing portraits of a Florida that is quickly being forgotten.
Y’all may think I’m a good writer, but I bow to the master. A few of my favorite lines:
“He had perhaps been bruised too often. The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence. Something in him was raw and tender. The touch of men was hurtful upon it, but the touch of pines was healing.”
“We were bred of earth before we were bred of our mothers… We cannot live without the earth or apart from it, and something is shriveled in a man’s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.”
“It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed, but not bought… We are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all, to time…”
“Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.”
Marjorie was bold, stubborn, and unapologetically herself. She hunted wild game, canned her own food, kept a menagerie of animals, and hosted an endless stream of visitors—writers, politicians, and everyday neighbors alike. She could be tender as a poet and tough as a pioneer, a true Florida original in spirit if not by birth.
One bad-ass lady who inspires me every day.
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