Literary Birthday – 8 August – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born on 8 August 1896 and died on 14 December 1953.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Quotes

1. I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing.
2. A woman never forgets the men she could have had; a man, the women he couldn’t.
3. Hemingway, damn his soul, makes everything he writes terrifically exciting (and incidentally makes all us second-raters seem positively adolescent) by the seemingly simple expedient of the iceberg principle – three-fourths of the substance under the surface. He comes closer that way to retaining the magic of the original, unexpressed idea or emotion, which is always more stirring than any words. But just try and do it!
4. Fear is the most easily taught of all lessons, and the fight against terror, real or imagined, is perhaps the history of man’s mind.
5. Sorrow was like the wind. It came in gusts.
6. But to make the intangible tangible, to pick the emotion out of the air and make it true for others, is both the blessing and the curse of the writer, for the thing between book covers is never as beautiful as the thing he imagined.
7. Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.
8. Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.
9. Words began fights and words ended them.
10. I most certainly do not think advertising people are wonderful. I think they are horrible, and the worst menace to mankind, next to war; perhaps ahead of war. They stand for the material viewpoint, for the importance of possessions, of desire, of envy, of greed. And war comes from these things.
11. Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.
12. A queer thing happens to me whenever I am all through with one piece of work, and I have wondered if it was common to all writers. Before I go to work on something else, I drop into the most terrific despair. It has always been so ? Then when the new work takes hold of my mind, nothing exists but the necessity for working it out.
13. Life is strong stuff, some of us can bear more of it than others.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American novelist and short story writer who helped establish the regional literature of backwoods Florida. Her fiction is known for its vivid rural settings and memorable portrayals of life in the Florida wilderness. Her first novel, South Moon Under, was a Book of the Month Club selection and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her best-known novel, The Yearling, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 and was later adapted into a film of the same name. In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek, a memoir about her life and relationships with her neighbours in rural Florida. It was adapted into a 1983 film, with Alfre Woodard receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Geechee. Her children’s book The Secret River, published after her death, received a Newbery Honor in 1956.

Image Source: Library of Congress, Carl van Vechten

by Amanda Patterson
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