In 1938 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Since then this classic of Cracker life in Northern Florida has remained in print, delighting readers who fall under the spell of its enchanted prose and grand story of growing up.

Though The Yearling is at its heart the story of Jody Baxter, the only living child of Penny Baxter and his wife Orry, and Jody’s love for a fawn which he has brought to the Baxter farm, this fine novel is also the story of a group of people living at the outward rim of society, the hardships which they encounter, and the fabulous natural world with which they are surrounded. After moving to Cross Creek, Fla., in the late 1920s, Marjorie Rawlings carefully studied the land and the people she found there. Eventually, she worked her notes and observations into this novel about a boy and his pet deer, and the demands of love and survival. Here we meet the Forresters, a rough country family who scrabble constantly to scratch their living from the harsh land. We meet Fodder-Wing, the Forrester who is sickly and weak, but whose affinity for nature and all its creatures imbues this novel with its strong sense of the natural environment and its importance even in a world in which the city holds sway.

Rawlings followed up The Yearling with Cross Creek, the story of her own life in Northern Florida and the lives of her neighbors, of working the orange grove, of exploring the swamps and forests surrounding Cross Creek. She tells us of her struggles on the land, of her eccentric and wild neighbors, of the blacks and poor whites who helped her raise her oranges. In Cross Creek we are given a piece of Northern Florida as it was in the 1930s, for Rawlings joins herself, body and blood, to the land. Here, for example, she writes of the road she walked in front of her house:

“Every pine tree, every gallberry bush, every passion vine, every joree rustling in the underbrush, is vibrant. I have walked it in trouble, and the wind in the trees beside me is easing. I have walked it in despair, and the red of the sunset is my own blood dissolving into the night’s darkness. For all such things were on the earth before us, and will survive after us, and it is given to us to join ourselves with them and be comforted.”

If you’ve read Rawlings, rejoice that she once lived and wrote these books. If not, you should expect a great treat.