Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C., in 1896. In 1928 she bought a 72-acre orange grove near Hawthorne, Florida, in the Cross Creek settlement, and her writing drew on the people and land there.
Her editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, encouraged her to write stories set in the Big Scrub, which led to her first novel, South Moon Under (1933). The Yearling (1938) brought her major success and won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She also wrote Cross Creek (1942) and The Sojourner (1953), and she died in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1953.
Source: Wikipedia