A collection of literary work that shows the artistic development of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author 
From her 
first poems and stories to her finely crafted essays as a newspaper and 
feature writer to the gathering brilliance that began at the outset of 
her Florida Period, highlighted by the Pulitzer Prize for 
The Yearling in 1939, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings became, in the words of Margaret 
Mitchell, America's "born perfect storyteller." Arguing that Rawlings 
has been underestimated and underappreciated as a great American writer, 
 Rodger Tarr and Brent Kinser present Rawlings's emergence and 
maturation as an artist. This collection brings together for the first 
time the work that contributed to her once stellar position as a hero of
 American letters. 
Rawlings's childhood publications in the 
Washington Post and McCall's magazine reveal a budding Romantic if not an emerging 
Transcendentalist determined to pursue humanity's relationship with 
nature. As a young storyteller Rawlings had a compelling interest in 
fairytales, marked by a sense of the comedic and the sentimental, and 
always the moral. Many of her early stories and poems, especially those 
written while she was a student at the University of Wisconsin, also 
reflect her developing feminist spirit, an interest that she continued 
to pursue as a feature writer for newspapers in Louisville, Kentucky, 
and Rochester, New York. 
Like many writers, Rawlings was 
self-critical. She was particularly aware of writing as a discipline and
 as an adult was prone to dismiss her early work as overly wrought. 
However, as her mature work demonstrates, she owed a great deal to the 
skills learned in her development as an artist. Rawlings knew that 
successful writing owed less to inspiration than to hard work, a lesson 
she experienced repeatedly during the writing of her stories and novels 
under the guiding hand of her celebrated editor Maxwell E. Perkins. This
 collection of early work, college writing, newspaper pieces, and 
stories of life in Florida is an intimate glimpse at an important writer
 mastering her craft.