The Yearling: The Pulitzer Winner Written in a Florida Farmhouse at Cross Creek
The most celebrated novel ever written about Florida was drafted in a wooden farmhouse on a 72-acre orange grove between two lakes, and you can still visit the house today.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings moved from New York to Cross Creek, a tiny settlement near Hawthorne, Florida, in 1928. She spent years wandering the Big Scrub north of Ocala, gathering material from her rural Florida neighbors, before writing The Yearling. Published in 1938, it tells the story of 12-year-old Jody Baxter and the fawn he raises in the Florida scrub country. The novel was based on a real family, the Longs of Pat’s Island, though in real life it was a girl who adopted the deer. It was the best-selling book in America in 1938, selling more than 250,000 copies, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939.
A 1946 film adaptation starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman won two Academy Awards. Rawlings, who became friends with Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston during her years in Florida, lived at Cross Creek until her death in 1953. Her farmhouse is now a state park and National Historic Landmark, open for guided tours. It sits about 20 miles southeast of Gainesville, looking much the way it did when she wrote the book that put rural Florida on the literary map.
