A new biography chronicles Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, a novelist who went on a quest for an authentic life

“If you like the book, I shall drink a quart of Bacardi in celebration,” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote to Maxwell Perkins before sending him her first novel, “South Moon Under,” in 1932. “If you don’t like it, I shall drink a quart of Bacardi.” Perkins liked her novel. Already the most important editor of his time, he added Rawlings to an elite roster that included Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was her great mentor and friend across 17 years of correspondence and some 700 letters, notes and telegrams. Under Perkins, Rawlings wrote her best two books: “The Yearling,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939, and “Cross Creek” (1942), an unclassifiable mix of memoir and observation about life on a remote citrus grove in interior rural Florida. Ann McCutchan’s plain-spoken new biography of Rawlings, “The Life She Wished to Live,” carefully unpacks their relationship. McCutchan is a sensitive observer of Rawlings’ work and of her deeply unconventional life in general. This is the most recent biography of Rawlings, after Elizabeth Silverthorne’s “Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek” appeared in 1988. It’s a pleasure to meet this cursing, hard-drinking, brilliant, self-destructive, car-wrecking, fun-loving, chain-smoking, alligator-hunting, moonshine-making, food-obsessed woman again on the page. Rawlings was grateful that Perkins took the long view in literary matters. Art mattered more than money; fame was OK, but only if noble and deserved. Rawlings had that kind of fame in the early 1940s, but her reputation has slipped. In part, it’s because “The Yearling,” about a boy whose father orders him to kill his constant companion, a pet deer, after it eats too much of the family’s sorely needed corn, is misperceived as a dewy young adult novel. In reality, it’s as unsentimental as a blade of saw grass. In part, too, it’s because Rawlings got tangled in an invasion of privacy lawsuit after describing one of her neighbors by name in “Cross Creek.” The court proceedings dragged on for five years, destroying her concentration and nerves. She was never quite the same. Finally, “The Yearling” is no longer (or rarely) taught because of some of its racial language. Rawlings used the N-word in her book, and in everyday life often referred to the Black workers on her citrus grove by the same term. Hers is a complicated case. In rural Florida, she was considered quite liberal in her time. She actively fought discrimination and struggled with her own prejudice. Her friend Zora Neale Hurston wrote to her about “Cross Creek”: “You have written the best thing on Negroes of any white writer who has ever lived.” Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., in 1896. Her father worked in a government patent office. He also loved the outdoors, and bought a dairy farm in nearby Maryland. Her mother was a frustrated social climber whom Rawlings disliked almost from birth. Rawlings was precocious. She entered, and won, a lot of literary contests. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1918 and, with her first husband, moved to New York City to make a go of it as a freelance writer. She did public relations work for the YWCA’s War Work Council; she dabbled in tabloid journalism to survive. She wrote “Songs of a Housewife,” a recurring column in verse for a Gannett newspaper. (One ended: “I like to hear the murmurings / When my dessert appears. / The symphony of supper-time / Is music to my ears!”) She was biding her time. She knew she had finer material inside her, like shale resting under a cornfield, and was willing to wait to excavate it properly. She first saw Florida while visiting with her husband. Together they bought, sight unseen, with money left from a small inheritance, a 72-acre orange grove and a rundown farmhouse. She wanted to write there full time and live on the citrus profits. It takes a certain eye to see the beauty of flat, swampy, sun-impacted rural Florida. Jack Kerouac didn’t have it. From nearby Orlando in the 1950s, he wrote to Joyce Johnson: “Nothing down here but scorpions, lizards, vast spiders, mosquitoes, vast cockroaches & thorns in the grass.” Rawlings had that eye. She bloomed at Cross Creek. She threw herself into the difficult work of running the grove, and essentially taught herself to fish and hunt. People had never heard a woman swear so frequently. She threw big dinners, serving game birds she’d shot herself or mallards she raised, achieving the best flavor, McCutchan writes, “by feeding them skim milk, clabber, grains and greens.” Rawlings was messy, and moody. One doctor told her, she said, “I had an engine too big for the chassis.” She suffered her entire life from abdominal pain caused by diverticulitis, which was bad for her joie de vivre. Her condition leads her biographer to give us a sentence for the ages: “Between four enemas, she wrote a sonnet.” Rawlings drank too much, and sometimes drove while doing so. This book describes at least five serious car crashes. She once plowed into a mule, destroying the animal and her car. A visitor to Cross Creek later wrote: “On the way to Ocala she nearly scared me out of my mind driving 75 miles an hour, at times almost 80, with one hand on the steering wheel, and a handkerchief wadded up in it, while with her other hand she fumbled about for cigarettes or the lighter on the dashboard.” Come to this biography for Rawlings’ outsize personality, her quest to lead a life that felt authentic to her. “There are times when I resent — almost to madness — being a woman,” she wrote in a letter. “I want to fare forth alone … I want to be a solitary fighter, loving no one, with no one loving me.” Stay for the portrait of a woman whose writing meant everything to her. She wanted the unvarnished truth about it, and about everything else. She warned Perkins: “I will bring up a live rattlesnake and drop it on your desk if you are ever polite about my stuff and I catch you at it.” To a friend she wrote: “Sexual failure, lack of happiness, none of it matters if I can say the things I want to say.”     The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling by Ann McCutchan | Illustrated | 418 pages | WW Norton & Co. Dwight Garner c.2021 The New York Times Company