MJK
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings(1896-1953)
Like many people of my generation, my first exposure to the writings of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings ("MJK") was by reading The Yearling. I subsequently watched (repeatedly, thanks to “Million Dollar Movie”) the film version starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. The edition I read was illustrated by Edward Shenton, an illustrator/artist whose work I would rediscover some forty-five years later, in a totally different context, when researching the sculptor Nancy Cox-McCormack.
My awareness of Rawlings was enhanced by a personal connection. My great-great aunt, Ethel Fairmont Snyder Beebe, an author of children’s books and activist in the humane movement, had attended the University of Wisconsin. She and Rawlings met there and developed a friendship that lasted until Rawlings’s death in 1953. Many of my childhood visits to my aunt included her reminiscences of times they shared. When my aunt passed away in 1978, I found a packet of letters written by Rawlings to my aunt. Many years later, I made the decision to donate them to the University of Florida (see “Gift of Early Florida Letters Enriches Smathers Libraries Rawlings Collection”). In 2000, I published them in the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Journal of Florida Literature. I subsequently acquired and likewise published a letter Rawlings wrote to J. J. Lankes, a woodblock print maker best known as an illustrator of the works of Robert Frost.
