Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: The Writer Who Traded New York for a Florida Orange Grove and Won the Pulitzer

In 1928, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings packed up her life in New York and moved to a 72-acre orange grove in Cross Creek, Florida, a tiny settlement between two lakes about 20 miles southeast of Gainesville. She was 32, struggling to sell her writing, and looking for a fresh start. What she found instead was the subject matter that would define her career.

The Backwoods That Changed Everything

Cross Creek was not a literary destination. It was a place of dirt roads, citrus groves, and cracker homesteads where neighbors hunted, fished, and lived close to the land. Rawlings threw herself into it. She learned to tend her grove, cooked with ingredients from her yard, and spent months at a time living with families deep in the Big Scrub wilderness nearby. She even took a two-week boat trip down the St. Johns River from its headwaters back to Cross Creek, gathering stories along the way.

A Pulitzer from the Porch

That immersion paid off. Her novel South Moon Under earned critical acclaim in 1933. Then came The Yearling in 1938, the story of a boy and his pet fawn in the Florida scrub. It became an international bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. A 1946 film starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman followed, winning two Academy Awards. She also published Cross Creek in 1942, a memoir of her life on the grove, and Cross Creek Cookery, a cookbook that became a bestseller of its own.

Visit Her Florida Home

Rawlings bequeathed her Cross Creek farmhouse to the University of Florida, and today it operates as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. The cracker-style home, her typewriter, and the surrounding farmyard look much as they did when she lived and wrote there. The park is open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at 18700 South CR-325, Cross Creek. Guided tours of the house run Thursday through Sunday. Admission is $3 per vehicle.