The Yearling

The Yearling was the best-selling novel in America for the year 1938 and won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize. It has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian and twenty-one other languages. M. K. Rawlings's editor was Max Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and other literary luminaries. Rawlings based her mental images upon her research of the time, the stories by Calvin Long and others, her ramblings in the Big Scrub region of National Forests in North Central Florida; the sites where she set the action of the book, and her experiences hunting and observing game. Years before the movie of 1946 was made, Rawlings got to know it first-hand through visits to Calvin and Mary Long, who served as models for the Baxter family. The Longs and their children lived in the heart of the Scrub County, in a clearing called Pat's Island. Rawlings renamed it "Baxter's Island". In the MGM's film, with Gregory Peck playing settler Ezra 'Penny' Baxter, "The Scrub" is almost a character itself. "(...) Here was the Scrub country," Peck intones at the film's opening. "Not many people lived here then, just a few pioneers. I found myself a wonderful wife and a little village nearby..." -- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s images were translated into prose and refined as she worked with editor Maxwell Perkins. Illustrations for the First Edition of The Yearling, published April 13, 1938, were done by Edward Shenton. Another edition of the book was published by Scribner and Sons in March of 1939 with illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. His visit to Marion County informed his work, and Rawlings was pleased with his drawings. These are still used on current publications of the book. A few years later the movie of The Yearling was produced. It was partly filmed on location in the Ocala National Forest. |...| A story of growth and survival in the most difficult conditions -- The Yearling, set in the scrubland of northern Florida a couple of decades after the Civil War, is the story of the Baxter family: 'Pa' Baxter - the father, a saintly figure who is wise, understanding, kind, brave, dutiful, stoic. 'Ma Ory' -- the mother, whose essential goodness has been buried to some degree by endless toil and the death of several babies; and Jody, who is about 12 when the story begins, a good-natured sprite for whom nature is benevolent and everything is to be explored. The Baxters live some 15 miles from the nearest town and four miles from their nearest neighbors, the Forresters, a family of massive sons who are variously good hearted and murderous drunks. In this environment, the little Baxter family scratches out its existence. Two themes predominate: the loss of childhood innocence and Implacable Nature. |...| Fighting off a pack of starving wolves, wrestling alligators in the swamp, romping with bear cubs, drawing off the venom of a giant rattlesnake bite with the heart of a fresh-killed deer--it's all in a day's work for the Baxter family of the Florida scrublands. But young Jody Baxter is not content with these electrifying escapades, or even with the cozy comfort of home with Pa and Ma. He wants a pet, a friend with whom he can share his quiet cogitations and his corn pone. Jody gets his pet, a frisky fawn he calls Flag. |...| Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend. There has been a film and even a musical based on this story.
===The Yearling (1938) -- A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook --
http://arthursclassicnovels.com/20th/rawlings/The%20Yearling-h.html