Natural Writer: A Story About Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Creative Minds Biography)

Gr 4-6-This biography begins with Rawlings's childhood in the early 1900s and shows her development as a writer through her death. Though she had a few successes in the writing field along the way, she dealt with much rejection of her work until she moved to Florida and began to write about the self-sufficient, rural people of Cross Creek. Her relationships with her parents, husbands, and backwoods friends are important parts of her story. The authors show that it took a total immersion into the Florida culture to write The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book ends with Rawlings's fight in court for a writer's right to write about his or her own life without fear of others suing for invasion of privacy. This easy-to-read biography has an attractive cover and a full-page charcoal illustration in each chapter. It could serve as a good introduction to The Yearling.

Jean Gaffney, Dayton and Montgomery County Public Library, Miamisburg, OH

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