In the short documentary, "Here Is Home: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Cross Creek," neighbors fondly remember their good friend and famous author. Rawlings moved from Rochester, NY to rural north Florida in 1928 to carve out a new life as a writer and citrus grove owner. Soon she realized her best material was the natural world around her and the people who eked out a living there. Her first work featuring Florida's Crackers was published in Scribner's Magazine in 1931, leading to many more stories, three novels, and a nonfiction chronicle about Cross Creek, the hamlet she called home. Rawlings's most notable novel, The Yearling, was the poignant tale of a boy and his pet fawn, set in 1870s frontier Florida; it cemented her position as the finest literary interpreter of the state's backwoods culture and environment. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1939, The Yearling was translated into more than 25 languages and made into an Oscar-winning movie.
This 40-minute documentary was made possible in part by travel grants from the Florida Humanities Council and the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, Special and Area Studies Collections, administered by The Friends of the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Farm. © 2018 SONYA DOCTORIAN All rights reserved.
