Born in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1896, Marjorie Kinnan attended public schools and graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1918. The next year she married Charles A. Rawlings, a newspaperman with whom she lived in various places over the next nine years. In that time she worked for periods as a reporter and feature writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Rochester (New York) Journal while attempting to establish a career as a writer of fiction. She managed to sell a few stories, but it was not until her sudden decision in 1928 to buy and settle on a 40-acre tract of orange grove near the hamlet of Cross Creek in northern Florida that she began to find her literary voice. From her first visit to the region she had felt herself attuned to the half-wild nature of the place and to the native ╥Crackers╙ who lived there. Two stories sold to Scribner╒s magazine brought her to the attention of Maxwell Perkins, editor of the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and others. Her ╥Gal Young Un╙ won the O. Henry Memorial Award for short stories in 1933.
Her first book, South Moon Under, also appeared in 1933 (the year of her divorce from Charles Rawlings) and was followed by Golden Apples, 1935, and The Yearling, 1938, which won a Pulitzer Prize, was made into a motion picture, and over subsequent years gradually assumed the status of a classic. Many of her stories were collected in When the Whippoorwill, 1940. Cross Creek, 1942, described her life in the Florida country and displayed her striking ability to convey in poetic prose her deep feelings of kinship to nature as well as her sharp ear for dialect and the characteristic Cracker humor. Cross Creek Cookery, 1942, combined recipes and anecdotes of the region. The Sojourner, 1953, her last book, was set instead in Michigan. She was at work on a biography of Ellen Glasgow when she died near St. Augustine, Florida, on December 14, 1953. Secret River, a children╒s book, appeared posthumously in 1955.
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