Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Author of “The Yearling,” hard-drinking sportswoman and friend of Hemingway (from the NYTimes Book Review)

“Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: Sojourner at Cross Creek,” by Elizabeth Silverthorne (The Overlook Press, 1990)

Swashbuckling women seem all the fashion. Publishers have noticed those women executives in blue suits rushing through airports clutching books by or about Beryl Markham or Isak Dinesen. The very same swashbuckling passengers may well want to clutch Elizabeth Silverthorne’s sympathetic biography of an American woman writer of spirit — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

Even if the 1983 film version of Rawlings’s autobiographical Cross Creek (starring Mary Steenburgen) did not pique interest, anyone who has recently read or reread The Yearling will agree that Rawlings deserves more attention. Half a century after its publication, The Yearling remains a thrilling book, even if it is circulated almost exclusively as a children’s title. The beautiful edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, which was reissued in 1983, is especially pleasing.

There is other evidence of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s standing as a 20th-century American writer. An editor with impeccable taste, Scribners’ Maxwell Perkins, chose his clients carefully and included her in company with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and when she died in 1953, an editorial…