Love Those Wide Open Spaces: Revisiting a Florida Classic

I’ve been spending some quality with an old friend this weekend, author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

March marks the 75th anniversary of her classic story The Yearling, and I went back to re-read it again. It was time well spent.

The Yearling, in case you don’t remember, is a coming of age story about a young boy growing up in the backwoods of Florida in the late 19^th Century. The child adopts a young fawn after its mother is killed.

Love, loneliness, life, death, and survival are all themes of the novel.

Kinnan Rawlings won a Pulitzer Prize for her book. MGM bought the rights and made her book into a movie, which starred Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, and Claude Jarman, Jr and is a classic.

The studio took the time to do the film right, purchasing land in Florida’s Big Scrub, building accurate sets, and filming on location. National Public Radio (NPR) did a fantastically fun story about the making of The Yearling I’ll link to HERE.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an interesting woman herself. She came to Florida after receiving a small inheritance and used her funds to purchase an orange grove. She stayed and lived off the land and her writing for 25 years.

Rawlings had two other books that did quite well, Cross Creek and Cross Creek Cookery, which documented the tales and the lifestyle of 1930’s Florida. She continued to write and publish, but none of works did as well as The Yearling and the Cross Creek series.

While celebrity brought fame and good fortune to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, it also made it increasingly harder for her to live among the Cracker neighbors she wrote about since they began to view her as a “cash cow”. She had to eventually sell home and move. She lived only a short while after leaving her farm, dying at age 59 of a brain hemorrhage.

You can visit the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings refurbished home and farm, located southeast of Gainesville, Florida in the Ocala National Forest. The State purchased her land and dedicated it as a Florida State Park in her name. It’s a wonderful place to stop and tour. Visit the homestead, and you’ll come to understand her connection to the place.

It’s time for me to get back to the work of writing now. Wishing everyone here a good and productive week.

- Sanne Collins

From the Ranch in Florida

What’s Been Keeping Me Busy Lately

Love Those Wide Open Spaces is a blog designed to follow my daily life as a freelance writer and rancher. It’s a life full of constant change and a wide scope of interests.

Freelance writing, by its definition, requires the ability to write on a variety of subjects, to juggle many assignments during the times of plenty, and to fill the void when checks are slow. That said, I’m always writing.

Much of my work is done for others such as corporations, websites, or articles penned under another’s name. I’ve sold the rights to these works, so they can’t be shared.

However, many of my projects are available under my own name and can be read right here on the web.

You can click on either the site or the story below to see them.

Check out what’s been keeping me busy lately!