Marjorie Kinnan (1896 - 1953)

Born 8 Aug 1896 in Washington, D.C., USA

Ancestors

Wife of Charles Alfred Rawlings Jr. — married 30 Apr 1919 (to 1933) in Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States

Wife of Norton Sanford Baskin — married 27 Oct 1941 in St. Johns, Florida Territory, United States

Died 14 Dec 1953 at age 57 in St. Augustine, Florida, USA

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Biography

Marjorie Kinnan is Notable.

Marjorie Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, D.C., to Arthur Frank Kinnan, an attorney for the US Patent Office, and Ida May Traphagen Kinnan.[1][2] She grew up in the Brookland neighborhood and was interested in writing as early as age six, and submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16. At age 15, she entered into a contest a story titled "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," for which she won a prize.[3]

She attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta[4] sorority and received a degree in English in 1918. She was selected as a member of the local senior women's honor society on campus that, in 1920, became a chapter of the national senior women's society, Mortar Board. She met Charles Rawlings while working for the school literary magazine. Kinnan briefly worked for the YWCA editorial board in New York, and married Charles in 1919.[1] The couple moved to Louisville, Kentucky, writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal and then Rochester, New York both writing for the Rochester Journal,[5] and Marjorie writing a syndicated column called "Songs of the Housewife."

In 1928, with a small inheritance from her mother, the Rawlingses purchased a 72 acre (290,000 m²) orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in a hamlet named Cross Creek for its location between Orange Lake and Lochloosa Lake. She brought the place to international fame through her writing. She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her "Florida cracker" neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land.[6][7] Wary at first, the local residents soon warmed to her and opened up their lives and experiences to her. Marjorie filled several notebooks with descriptions of the animals, plants, Southern dialect, and recipes and used these descriptions in her writings.

Her first novel, South Moon Under, was published in 1933. The book captured the richness of Cross Creek and its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in. Moonshiners were the subject of several of her stories, and Rawlings lived with a moonshiner for several weeks near Ocala to prepare for writing the book.[7] South Moon Under was included in the Book-of-the-Month Club and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

That same year, she and her husband Charles were divorced; living in rural Florida did not appeal to him

Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same title, The Yearling.

In 1941 Marjorie married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin (1901–1997), and he remodeled an old mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine (currently the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum). After World War II, he sold the hotel and managed the Dolphin Restaurant at Marineland, which was then Florida's number one tourist attraction. Marjorie and Norton made their primary home at Crescent Beach, and Rawlings and Baskin both continued their respective occupations independently.

Rawlings died in 1953 in St. Augustine of a cerebral hemorrhage. She bequeathed most of her property to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she taught creative writing in Anderson Hall.

Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Kinnan_Rawlings

• Bloom, Harold, ed."American Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960." Volume 3. Chelsea House, Philadelphia 1998.

• Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Biography | Dictionary of Literary Biography

• Find A Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com : accessed 01 December 2018), memorial page for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (8 Aug 1896–14 Dec 1953), Find A Grave Memorial no. 6128, citing Antioch Cemetery, Island Grove, Alachua County, Florida, USA ; Maintained by Find A Grave

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/6128/marjorie-rawlings.

• "Florida Marriages, 1830-1993," database with images, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2342-4Q7 : 27 November 2020), Norton Sanford Baskin and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, 1941; citing Marriage, Florida, United States, citing multiple County Clerks of Court, Florida; FHL microfilm 2,115,750.