New release
The Life She Wished to Live
A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling
Finalist, Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts Writing
now available in softcover
“Fascinating and lively . . . A masterly and entertaining biography.” Sarah Harrison Smith, Wall Street Journal.
“McCutchan is a sensitive observer of Rawlings’s work, and of her deeply unconventional life.” Dwight Garner, New York Times.
Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an unlikely author of a coming-of-age novel about a poor central Florida child and his pet fawn―much less one that has become synonymous with Florida literature writ large.
Rawlings was a tough, passionate, and independent woman who refused the early-twentieth-century conventions of her upbringing. Determined to forge a literary career beyond those limitations, she found her voice in the remote hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. Between hunting alligator and managing an orange grove, Rawlings employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life an unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail―a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938.
The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries―including her legendary editor Maxwell Perkins and friends Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Hemingway―and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her.
“When I came to the Creek, and knew the old grove and farmhouse at once as home, there was some terror, such as one feels in the first recognition of a human love.”
“The dream is dreamed. It must be built; the intangible loveliness must be made so tangible that critics’ teeth will find actual substance to tear into.”
“Beauty is not absolute, but is distinctly relative. What fails to stir me may constitute beauty for you.”
“You are a wonderful example of a shell game with your soul as the pea,” Marjorie’s first husband, Charles Rawlings, wrote to her. “God knows which walnut shell you will find it under next.”
More Books by Ann McCutchan
Photo by Susan Moldenhauer
Ann McCutchan is the author of six books of memoir, essay, and biography. Her newest book, The Life She Wished to Live: a Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Author of The Yearling, was published by W.W. Norton in May, 2021. and issued in softcover in 2022. She is a lyricist and librettist as well, currently working on her ninth commission. She lives in Asheville, NC.