1939 Pulitzer Prize Review: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. It trailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue but blue gray. The boy Jody watched it…” -opening lines

Set in the late 19th century wildlands of central Florida, The Yearling is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ celebrated bildungsroman about a farm boy who gradually learns to cast off his adolescent youth. This book was inspired by Rawlings’ decision to relocate to a vast citrus ranch situated in the “hammock country” of Cross Creek, Florida. Fascinated by the landscape, Rawlings filled numerous notebooks documenting the flora, fauna, and culture of the region. She wrote about the simple but harsh lives of the “Florida Cracker” people –“cracker” being a nickname for the Southern peoples who migrated southward from Appalachia to Georgia and Florida (it has since become a pejorative term). The term “cracker” originally came from the sound of cracking whips used by cattlemen. At any rate, the rural region outside Gainesville, Florida was composed mainly of poor whites who survived by hunting, fishing, or tending to the surrounding orchards. It was a difficult life, often a struggle to survive, and this is where we find ourselves in The Yearling.

The novel takes place across the span of one year in the life of a twelve-year-old boy named Jody Baxter. Jody is the only child of Penny and Ora “Ma” Baxter. They are a family of subsistence hunters and farmers who struggle to eek out an existence. Jody’s father, Penny Baxter, is a small but capable hunter who leads Jody through the untamed wilderness filled with bears, wolves, and panthers. Before settling in Florida, Penny was apparently a Confederate veteran during the American Civil War. His background is somewhat opaque but little clues are dropped here and there throughout the story. In the novel we are introduced to a variety of other characters as well: Slewfoot, a crafty bear who seems to elude the Baxters at every turn (until the conclusion); the Forresters, an unruly neighboring family whose handicapped son “Fodder-wing” eventually becomes friends with Jody; and the wise old Grandma Hutto.

At the outset Jody’s father, Penny Baxter, is bitten by a rattlesnake. Fearful of how quickly the poison might affect him, Penny and Jody must race home to find medical help, but while en route, Penny’s health continues to deteriorate so he slays a deer in order to hopefully harvest the poison from his body before time runs out. Still, Jody must rush home to the find a doctor by himself. Mercifully, he is granted aid from nearby rivals, the Forresters, who help save Penny’s life, despite being unfriendly neighbors. This moment becomes a harrowing yet important experience for young Jody –he is still a sensitive and impressionable child. Soon Jody befriends the slain deer’s fawn which he names “Flag.” He brings Flag home to dwell among the Baxter family and we, the listless readers, are offered several hundred pages of minimal intrigue –scenes of hunting and various attacks by wolves and bears. Almost nothing actually drives the plot forward in this section of the novel. It is only at the conclusion, when we arrive at Penny’s ailing health, that we discover Jody’s dramatic inner conflict over the need to kill Flag. At this point, Flag has eaten a portion of the Baxter family’s vital food supplies and Jody is expected to kill the deer as recompense. In the final chapter, Jody subsequently attempts to flee to Boston, hoping to escapes his troubles at home, but he is soon picked up and returned home. Nevertheless, this little trip reveals that Jody has suddenly matured into a young man who is capable of assuming his father’s responsibilities. At the conclusion, Jody is now no longer a “yearling” because he has learned to face his own problems –the parallels drawn between the death of Flag and the loss of Jody’s youth and innocence are made starkly apparent. While intended to be a “coming of age” tale in the vein of later young adult novels like Where The Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, or Hatchet, I must admit The Yearling is a bit of a slog to get through. I would not soon recommend this novel to fellow travelers, save only for the most committed mountaineers of the Pulitzer Prize-winners.

Despite being a well-celebrated novel, I found The Yearling to be a drab and dreary read. Rawlings is to be praised for her bucolic portrait of a region and a lifestyle rarely highlighted, but the plot, structure, and characters in The Yearling I found to be sorely lacking. There is almost nothing at stake throughout the novel, and the few remarkable plot-points are concentrated at the beginning and end of the book. I tend to agree with W.J. Stuckey when he says that “Although The Yearling does not drop to the level of such prize winners as The Able McLaughlins and Lamb in His Bosom, it is nevertheless too slight and sentimental to merit serious attention.”

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Notable Quotations:

“He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring. He was as drunk as Lem Forrester on a Saturday night. His head was swimming with the strong brew made up of the sun and the air and the thin gray rain” (17).

“In a late afternoon toward the end of August, Jody went with the fawn to the sink-hole for fresh water for supper. The road was bright with flowers. The sumac was in bloom, and the colic root sent up tall stalks of white or orange orchid-like flowers. The French mulberries were beginning to ripen on slim stems. They were lavender in color, close-clustered, like snails’ eggs along lily stalks. Butterflies sat on the first purple buds of the fragrant deer-tongue, opening and closing their wings slowly, as though waiting for the buds to open and the nectar to be revealed. The covey call of quail sounded again…” (259 -this quotation is representative of many beautiful scene-setting passages in The Yearling).

“He found himself listening for something. It was the sound of the yearling for which he listened, running around the house or stirring on his moss pallet in the corner of the bedroom. He would never hear him again… Flag – he did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling. He would be lonely all his life… In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, ‘Flag!’ It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy’s voice. Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live-oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever” (509 -closing lines).

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About The 1939 Pulitzer Prize Decision

The 1939 Novel Jury was composed of three returning members: Joseph W. Krutch (Chair), Jefferson B. Fletcher, and Robert M. Lovett. As with Gone With The Wind, the jury again selected a bestseller for the Pulitzer Prize by honoring The Yearling. According to John Hohenberg, this selection made the critics grumble but it pleased the Pulitzer Board.

• Joseph Wood Krutch (1893-1970) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and studied at the University of Tennessee and Columbia University. After serving in the army, he traveled throughout Europe with a friend, poet and critic Mark Van Doren. He taught composition at Brooklyn Polytechnic and became a theater critic at The Nation where he worked for many years. Something of a pantheist, mystic, and naturalist –he penned widely read biographies of Henry David Thoreau and Samuel Johnson.
• Jefferson Butler Fletcher (1865-1946) was born in Chicago, served in the American Field Ambulance Services during World War I, and was educated at Harvard and Bowdoin College. He was a long-serving professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University (from 1904-1939) and was considered a foremost expert on the Italian Renaissance and Dante. In his obituary in The New York Times, it was noted that he served on the Pulitzer Novel Jury for “several years.” Sadly, his son died in an automobile accident in 1926, Fletcher also had a daughter.
• Robert Morss Lovett (1870-1956) was a Bostonian who studied at Harvard. He taught literature at the University of Chicago for many years, he was associate editor of The New Republic, served as governor secretary of the Virgin Islands, and was a political activist –he was accused of being a communist by the Dies Committee which forced him out of his secretary position. He was often on the frontlines of left-leaning picket lines, and helped launch the careers of several young writers, including John Dos Passos. In later years, his wife became a close friend and associate of Jane Addams and the couple lived at Hull House for a spell.

Despite some grumblings about the jury’s top selection this year, several other novels were considered for the prize, including All This and Heaven Too by Rachel Field, the story of a French governess who scandalously falls in love with her employer prior to the French Revolution of 1848; Black is My True Love’s Hair by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, the tale of a shamed woman as she returns to her home village; May Flavin by Myron Brinig, which conveys the life and times of a struggling Irish girl brought up in Chicago who grows and raises a family of her own in New York; and Renown by Frank O. Hough, a fictionalized account of Benedict Arnold during the American Revolutionary War.

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Who Is Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings?

Born Marjorie Kinnan (1896-1953), Marjorie grew up in Washington DC before attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In college she met Charles Rawlings and they were married soon after. In their early years together the couple moved frequently from Kentucky to New York (however in her later years Marjorie had come to despise all things urban).

In 1928, Rawlings received an inheritance from her mother and purchased a 72-acre orange grove on Cross Creek near Hawthorne, Florida. Here, she began writing. She acquired a literary agent, Max Perkins of Scribner’s (the same agent as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald). Her stories mainly focused on the lives of neighbors and acquaintances in the surrounding impoverished, rural region of north-central Florida (south of Gainesville). Unfortunately, some of her neighbors were displeased with their portrayal in her books and she was later sued for libel, much to her private dismay.

Rawlings’ first success was a novel called South Moon Under in 1933 which was considered for the Pulitzer Prize, but her magnum opus was The Yearling in 1938. It was selected as a national Book of the Month, it was later distributed to soldiers during World War II, it became the best-selling novel of 1938, it won of the Pulitzer Prize, and was even made into a movie when MGM acquired the rights for a film. Starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, Hollywood’s interpretation of The Yearling was released in 1946 (click here to read my review of the film). During her lifetime, Rawlings also published numerous short stories (including an O. Henry Award-winner), as well as a semi-fictional memoir, and a children’s book called The Secret River which was published posthumously and won the Newbury Medal.

Despite all of her success, Rawlings’s marriage was collapsing. Charles despised the rural life in Florida and their relationship grew apart until he finally field for divorce. Rawlings now found herself isolated from her husband as well as her neighbors. In addition to anger over unflattering portrayals in her books, she was also resented by her neighbors for presumed open-minded racial tolerance. Rawlings once invited Zora Neal Hurston to visit her home, and rather than force Hurston to spend the night in a tenant or workman’s house, Rawlings welcomed her into a private residence. These controversies engendered tensions which were most unfortunate and eventually culminated in Rawlings moving away.

In time, Rawings moved to a beach house near St. Augustine, Florida where she was remarried, this time to Norton Baskin, a hotelier. They renovated and managed an old hotel together. Rawlings continued to write until she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953. Most of her property was donated to the University of Florida where she taught creative writing. A dormitory on the campus and an elementary school are named in her honor. Today, her orange grove and farmhouse are maintained as an historic state park in central Florida.

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Film Adaptation:

• The Yearling (1946)
  • Director: Clarence Brown
  • Starring: Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, Claude Jarman Jr.

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Literary Context in 1938-1939:

• Nobel Prize for Literature (1938): American author and past Pulitzer Prize-winner, Pearl Buck, “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”
• Per Publishers Weekly, the top bestselling novel in 1938 was The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Other notable books on the bestseller list that year included: The Citadel by A. J. Cronin, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Northwest Passage by Kenneth Roberts, All This, and Heaven Too by Rachel Field, and The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield.
• The John Dos Passos U.S.A. trilogy was collectively published in 1938, containing his novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
• Samuel Beckett was stabbed in the chest in Paris and nearly killed. His first completed novel Murphy was published in London.
• The first live drama adaptation in Orson Welles’s The Mercury Theatre on the Air series was broadcast: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
• Muslims protested in London against passages they see as disrespectful to their religion in H. G. Wells’s A Short History of the World (1922).
• Orson Welles’s notorious radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds (with script by Howard Koch) was broadcast in The Mercury Theatre on the Air series.
• Jorge Luis Borges was injured in an accident and develops blood poisoning. While recovering the following year he wrote the first short story that would come to identify his later characteristic style.
• Agatha Christie published a couple novels: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and Appointment with Death.
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier was published.
• The Unvanquished by William Faulkner was published.
• All This and Heaven Too by Rachel Field was published.
• Brighton Rock by Graham Greene was published.
• Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis was published.
• Anthem by Ayn Rand was published.
• Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre was published.
• The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White was published.
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell was published.
• Our Town by Thornton Wilder was published.

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Did The Right Book Win?

As spelled out above, I didn’t really care for The Yearling. Instead it would have been a nice acknowledgment for the Pulitzer Prize to honor another novel, perhaps even John Dos Passos’s entire U.S.A. Trilogy, which was tragically overlooked by the Pulitzer Prizes.

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Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan. The Yearling. New York, Aladdin Classics (Simon & Schuster), 2001 (1938).