The Yearling Country and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

North of Ocala, the land opens into a low hammock country of moss-draped oaks and orange grove remnants. A dirt road called County Road Three Twenty-Five curves past a farmhouse in a settlement called Cross Creek, where the land narrows between two lakes. This is where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings came to live in nineteen twenty-eight, and where she wrote some of the most celebrated American novels of the twentieth century.

Rawlings was a journalist from Washington who bought a seventy-two-acre orange grove here almost on impulse. What she found was not just land but a culture: the Florida Cracker community, rural white families who had worked this same scrub country for generations, hunting, fishing, growing oranges, and living by rhythms the outside world had not yet disrupted.

She wrote about them without condescension, in their own voice, from inside their daily life. Her nineteen thirty-three novel South Moon Under drew on the people of the Ocala scrub directly. Her nineteen thirty-eight novel The Yearling, about a boy named Jody Baxter coming of age in a place she called the Big Scrub, the same forest that is now the Ocala National Forest, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The film version, made in nineteen forty-six, introduced that landscape to millions who had never been to Florida.

In nineteen forty-two she published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of the neighbors and land she had adopted. The book was funny, precise, and affectionate. A Florida jury later debated whether she had the right to write it.

Rawlings lived at Cross Creek for twenty-five years. The farmhouse is now a state historic park and a National Historic Landmark. You can walk through the orange grove and see the porch where she sat and wrote the Florida she found.