Author | Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings |
---|---|
Language | English |
Genre | Young adult novel |
Publisher | Charles Scribner's Sons |
Publication date | 1938 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 416 (mass market paperback) |
Preceded by | South Moon Under |
Followed by | Cross Creek |
The Yearling is a novel by American writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, published in March 1938. [1] It was the main selection of the Book of the Month Club in April 1938. It won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel.
It was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1938, when it sold more than 250,000 copies. It was the seventh-best seller in 1939. [2] The book has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian, and 22 other languages. [3] [4]
Rawlings's editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary luminaries. She had submitted several projects to Perkins for his review, and he rejected them all. He advised her to write about what she knew from her own life, and The Yearling was the result.
Young Jody Baxter lives with his parents, Ora and Ezra "Penny" Baxter, on a small farm in the backwoods of the Big Scrub [5] in Florida in the years following the Civil War. His parents had six other children before him, but they died in infancy. His mother has difficulty bonding with the boy. Jody loves the outdoors and his family. He has wanted a pet for as long as he can remember, but his mother says that they barely have enough food to feed themselves, let alone a pet.
A subplot involves the hunt for an old bear named Slewfoot that randomly attacks the Baxter livestock. Later the Baxters and the rowdy Forresters get in a fight about the bear and continue to fight about nearly anything. (While the Forresters are presented as a disreputable clan, the disabled youngest brother, Fodder-Wing, is a close friend to Jody.) The Forresters steal the Baxters' hogs. While Jody and his father Penny are out searching for the stolen stock, Penny is bitten in the arm by a rattlesnake. Penny shoots a doe, in order to use its liver to draw out the snake's venom. This saves Penny's life but leaves an orphaned fawn.
Jody convinces his parents to allow him to adopt the fawn and it becomes his constant companion. He later learns that Fodder-Wing named it Flag. The book explores Jody's life as he matures along with Flag. Jody struggles with strained relationships, hunger, death of beloved friends, and the capriciousness of nature through a catastrophic flood. He also has tender moments with his family, the fawn, and their neighbors and relatives. Along with his father, he comes face to face with the rough life of a farmer and hunter. Throughout, the well-mannered, God-fearing Baxters and the good folk of nearby Volusia and the "big city," Ocala, are starkly contrasted with their hillbilly neighbors, the Forresters.
As Jody takes his final steps into maturity, he is forced to make a desperate choice between Flag and his family. The parents realize that the growing Flag is endangering their survival, as he persists in eating the corn crop on which the family is relying for food the next winter. Jody's father orders the boy to take Flag into the woods and shoot him, but Jody cannot bring himself to do it.
When his mother shoots the deer and wounds him, Jody is forced to shoot Flag and kill the yearling. In blind fury, Jody runs off, only to come up against the true meaning of hunger, loneliness, and fear. After an ill-conceived attempt to reach an older friend in Boston while traveling in a broken-down canoe, Jody is picked up by a mail ship and returned to Volusia. In the end, Jody comes of age, assuming increasingly adult responsibilities in the difficult "world of men", but always surrounded by the love of family.
The novel was adapted into a film of the same name in 1946, starring Gregory Peck as Penny Baxter and Jane Wyman as Ora Baxter. Both were nominated for Oscars for their performances. Claude Jarman Jr. as Jody Baxter won the Juvenile Award Oscar.
In 1949, Claude Pascal adapted the film into a newspaper comic, under its French title Jody et le Faon (Jody and the Fawn). [6]
A Broadway musical adaption with music by Michael Leonard and lyrics by Herbert Martin was produced by Lore Noto in 1965 at the Alvin Theatre. The musical's book was by Noto and Herbert Martin. David Wayne and Delores Wilson played Ezra and Ora Baxter, and David Hartman was Oliver Hutto. The show played only three performances. [7]
Barbra Streisand recorded four songs from the show: "I'm All Smiles", "The Kind of Man A Woman Needs", "Why Did I Choose You?", and "My Pa".
A Japanese animated version was released in 1983.
The 1983 film Cross Creek , about Rawlings and the incident that inspired the novel, starred Mary Steenburgen, Rip Torn, Peter Coyote and Dana Hill.
A 1994 television adaptation starred Peter Strauss as Ezra Baxter, Jean Smart as Ora Baxter, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Buck.
A 2012 song by singer/songwriter Andrew Peterson, "The Ballad of Jody Baxter", deals with themes from The Yearling. The song is on his album Light for the Lost Boy .
The Long homestead in the book and the film's shooting location are now part of the Ocala National Forest. Visitors can hike the Yearling Trail and pass the sites where the homes were and the now dry sinkhole, and pay respects at the Long Family Cemetery. [8]
The Yearling is a 1946 American Family Western film directed by Clarence Brown, produced by Sidney Franklin, and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). The screenplay by Paul Osborn and John Lee Mahin (uncredited) was adapted from Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's 1938 novel of the same name. The film stars: Gregory Peck, Jane Wyman, Claude Jarman Jr., Chill Wills and Forrest Tucker.
William Maxwell Evarts "Max" Perkins was an American book editor, best remembered for discovering authors Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Thomas Wolfe.
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1942 for her novel In This Our Life. She published 20 novels, as well as short stories, to critical acclaim. A lifelong Virginian, Glasgow portrayed the changing world of the contemporary South in a realistic manner, differing from the idealistic escapism that characterized Southern literature after Reconstruction.
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American writer who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie of the same name. The book was written before the concept of young adult fiction arose, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.
Cross Creek is a 1983 American biographical drama romance film starring Mary Steenburgen as The Yearling author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The film is directed by Martin Ritt and is based in part on Rawlings's 1942 memoir Cross Creek.
The Ocala National Forest is the second largest nationally protected forest in the U.S. State of Florida. It covers 607 square miles (1,570 km2) of North Central Florida. It is located three miles (5 km) east of Ocala and 16 miles (26 km) southeast of Gainesville. The Ocala National Forest, established in 1908, is the oldest national forest east of the Mississippi River and the southernmost national forest in the continental U.S. The word Ocala is thought to be a derivative of a Timucuan term meaning "fair land" or "big hammock". The forest is headquartered in Tallahassee, as are all three National Forests in Florida, but there are local ranger district offices located in Silver Springs and Umatilla.
Stormy Weather is a 1995 novel by Carl Hiaasen. It takes place in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Andrew in South Florida and concerns the tragic effects of the disaster, including insurance scams, street fights, hunting for food and shelter, corrupt bureaucracy, a ravaged environment and disaster tourists.
The Juniper Prairie Wilderness is a protected wilderness area in the Ocala National Forest in Florida, United States.
Cross Creek is an unincorporated community in Alachua County, Florida, United States. It is located on Cross Creek, a short stream connecting Orange and Lochloosa lakes.
The Marion Hotel is a historic hotel in Ocala, Florida, United States. It is located at 108 North Magnolia Avenue. On October 16, 1980, it was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The manager of the hotel in the 1930s was Norton Baskin, a career hotelier originally from Union Springs, Alabama, who had worked in hotels in Atlanta and Valdosta, Georgia, and Lake Worth, Florida, before coming to Ocala in 1933. It was there that he met the author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who was living nearby in the hamlet of Cross Creek. The story of their long courtship is told in the 1983 film Cross Creek, which featured Mary Steenburgen as Rawlings and Peter Coyote as Baskin. While Baskin managed the hotel, famous guests included actor W. C. Fields, novelist Sinclair Lewis, and journalist John Hersey. With money made from her bestselling novel The Yearling, Rawlings was able to invest in a hotel, run by Baskin, in St. Augustine, where the couple moved and married in 1941. In 2022 plans were announced to restore the Marion Hotel building as a boutique hotel, after decades serving as a bank and office building.
Victor Nunez is a film director, professor at the Florida State University College of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts, and a founding member of the Independent Feature Project and Sundance Film Festival. He is best known for directing the critically acclaimed films A Flash of Green, Ruby in Paradise and Ulee's Gold. In 2008 Nunez was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame and he is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
A Land Remembered is a best-selling novel written by author Patrick D. Smith, and published in 1984 by Pineapple Press. It is historical fiction set mostly in pioneer or "cracker" Florida. The story covers over a century of Florida history from 1858 to 1968.
David McCheyne Newell was an American journalist, novelist, and children's writer perhaps most famous for his books regarding early twentieth-century rural life in West Central Florida. In If Nothin' Don't Happen and The Trouble of It Is the fictional narrator, Billy Driggers, tells true-to-life stories about the people of Florida's Gulf Hammock and the surrounding environs during the interwar years. Earlier writings included The Fishing and Hunting Answer Book, illustrated by Lynn Bogue Hunt, a children's book titled American Animals, "Cougars and Cowboys" and numerous short stories and articles.
Volusia is an unincorporated community in Volusia County, Florida, United States, on the eastern shore of the St. Johns River. It is about three miles south of Lake George and across the river from the town of Astor in Lake County. Established by Spanish missionaries, Volusia is one of the oldest European settlements in Florida. The main route through the town is State Road 40, which crosses the St. Johns on the Astor Bridge.
The Yearling is a 1994 American made-for-television coming-of-age drama film based on the 1938 novel The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It was produced by RHI Entertainment, sponsored by Kraft General Foods and broadcast on CBS on April 24, 1994. It is also a remake of the 1946 theatrical film The Yearling starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman.
Robert Bonoff Radnitz was an American film producer best known for his production of the family films Sounder and Where the Lilies Bloom. He produced several movies, many of which were adapted from children's literature.
Moothiringode Chithrabhanu Nambudiripad was a pioneer of popular science writing in Malayalam language and an eminent translator. He was one of the founders of popular science movement in Kerala State, India. He was conferred several awards for his writing and translation, and for contribution to society.
The Secret River is a children's fantasy novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling. Published in 1955, The Secret River received a Newbery Honor Award. The first edition, illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner Leonard Weisgard, was issued after Rawlings' death. The book was revised and reissued in 2009 with illustrations by Caldecott Medalists Leo and Diane Dillon. The new edition received an international children's book design award in 2012. The Secret River is the only book Rawlings wrote specifically for children. The story of young Calpurnia, who goes on a quest to find a magical river and catch fish for her starving family and friends, it has two themes common in Rawlings' writing, the magic of childhood and the struggle of people to survive in a harsh environment.
The Walls of Jericho is a 1948 American drama film directed by John M. Stahl, written by Lamar Trotti, and starring Cornel Wilde, Linda Darnell, Anne Baxter, Kirk Douglas, Ann Dvorak, Colleen Townsend and Marjorie Rambeau. The picture was released by 20th Century Fox on August 4, 1948.
Gal Young 'Un is a 1979 American drama film directed by Victor Nuñez.
Kevin De Ornellas, “The Yearling”, in Abby H. P. Werlock, ed., The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel, 3 vols (New York: Facts on File, 2006), volume 3, pp. 1401-2. ISBN 0-8160-4528-3.