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Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings –
Pulitzer Prize-winning Author of ‘The Yearling’
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was a woman with a passion
for adventure, fascinated with the remote wilderness
of rural Florida and the lives of Florida natives in
the early 1900’s. She was born in Washington, D.C.
in 1896 and attended the University of Wisconsin
receiving her English degree. She married and lived
in Rochester and Louisville working as a newspaper
journalist, until she received her mother’s small
inheritance that enabled her to purchase a 72-acre
orange grove in a hamlet called Cross Creek,
Florida.
Through her writing and international fame, Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings brought Cross Creek to life,
capturing the richness of the folks around her –
their lives and experiences. By 1933, her first
novel was published – South Moon Under. And 5 years
later, she struck gold with The Yearling. Receiving
the Pulitzer Prize, she was propelled into the
celebrity world of fellow writers Ernest Hemmingway,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost and Margaret
Mitchell.
Today the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State
Park is located in Cross Creek. The Rawlings house
(a National Historic Landmark) is a notable example
of the Cracker (descendents of pioneer settlers)
style of architecture, derived from a variety of
influences to suit the climate and available
technology of the rural South. Here you can visit
her ‘place of enchantment’ through the citrus grove
where rangers in 1930’s period attire share here
home, personal stories and farm life.
Only a half day’s drive from the coast of St.
Augustine, Marjorie bought a beach cottage on
Crescent Beach. She met and married again, to
hotelier Norton Baskin who had been an innkeeper in
Ocala. Together they decided to purchase one of St.
Augustine’s true ‘castles’, a 19-bedroom mansion
built by William Warden, a partner in the Standard
Oil Company with John D. Rockefeller and Henry
Flagler. They named it Castle Warden Hotel…Norton
running the hotel and restaurant…Marjorie
entertaining prominent guests.
Although she continued to write, it was The Yearling
that became and remained her literary legacy. She
and Norton made the Crescent Beach cottage their
home, Norton surviving Marjorie by 44 years; in 1997
they were buried near Island Grove, Florida. What
happened to their Castle Warden Hotel? It’s now
Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum!
We dedicate our bungalow to Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings with Baskin’s inscription “Through her
writing, she endeared herself to the people of the
world”.
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