The Life She Wished to Live

The Matheson History Museum is excited to welcome author Ann McCutchan on Friday, November 19, at 7pm at the Matheson to discuss her latest book The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Author of the Yearling. This program is hosted in partnership with the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries and the University of Florida Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.

For the safety of staff and attendees, capacity will be limited to 50 people and masks are required. Admission is free but registration is required. A virtual option via Zoom is available for those who cannot attend in person: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gIFS66ZbQmKzqtNt_c_1fw.

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 Floridian 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.