Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

by Gordon E. Bigelow

"Bigelow skillfully details Marjorie Rawlings’ literary career, from failure to success to relative neglect, with illuminating discussion of her struggles to find her right subjects, themes, voice. The appraisals of her accomplishments are thoughtfully balanced and fair. He justly believes that the books transcend the limits of locale, speaking a language which is more than dialect. The scholarly and critical integrity of this study is informed by an awareness of these larger issues and by an understanding of pertinent American traditions." American Literature  "Literary critics would have more readers if their books were all as interesting as Bigelow’s."— Miami Herald "Bigelow writes with a gusto refreshing to encounter . . . immensely readable." The Mississippi Quarterly Frontier Eden, the first extensive study of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, tells with lively warmth of her love affair with Florida and with the Florida cracker people who were here chief subjects. The book contains never-published letters to, from, and about Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Glasgow, and Max Perkins.

Genres: Biography

162 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1980

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully detailed account of Rawlings's life and works. My favorite passages:

"On the day late in the fall of 1930 when she was lost for several hours in the scrub and felt the unmitigated silence of the wilderness press in upon her, and had the experience so rare to modern man of nakedly confronting the primordial heart of nature with no mediating buffer of civilization--no roads, no vehicles, no lights or sounds, no signaling systems, not even the presence of another human being--on that day also she felt no fear but a suffusion of joy and healing calm something like a mystic elation."

"'Two people can stand side by side and look at a Florida hammock. One sees only an obnoxious tangle and imagines rattlesnakes under every palmetto. The other sees beauty. I was duck hunting with two men one morning on Orange Lake. We crossed the lake just at dawn. The moon was setting and the sun was rising. It was a world of saffron and silver. One man said, "Isn't it beautiful?" and the other said, "What's beautiful? Where are the ducks?"' She was deeply convinced that one of the general ills of modern life, particularly for people in cities, was this preoccupation with 'the ducks,' with utilitarian busyness of one kind or another, so that they were unable to see the beauty with which they were surrounded, even in cities."

"The pastoral vision in her books is of a world of natural beauty free from the stench and ugliness of modern cities, but it also includes Penny's stoic conviction that life will inevitably knock a man down, and when it does a man takes this for his share and goes on. This kind of pastoralism is neither an invitation to dalliance under the yum-yum tree nor to a wallowing in the pit of existentialist despair. Such a balanced view of human existence is more traditional than modern, and one might even say, more 'classic.'"

[Julianne S · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now this is a deeply obscure little book which came into my possession through a fluke. Most people I know haven't even heard of MKR, let alone a regional university-backed biographer. And it's one of the better biographies I've read. Thought-provoking, that.

I did have some issues with it. This guy has a distinct tone of snotty professorial chauvinism, and felt the need to constantly say that Rawlings wasn't as talented or important as Faulkner and Hemingway and other male contemporaries (whereas in my opinion, she was better than all of them). He realllly didn't like The Sojourner, making him Part of the Problem. And as a committed and highly intellectual Literary Analyst, he was eager to cram her into boxes and schools of thought that I think she would've resented, while blatantly not understanding her nearly as well as he thought he did.

But the straightforward biography section is great, enhanced by the fact that he was able to interview people who knew her and had access to a huge collection of her letters and other personal writings. The book is quite well-written (even the jerk bits), but it's at its best when it's simply quoting Marjorie, whom I now feel an even greater care and affinity for than I did before. So these quotes are hers.

"The sporting people are delightful. They lave your soul. You feel clean and natural when you are with them. Then when you leave them, you are overcome with the knowledge that you are worlds away from them. You know things they will never know. Yet they wear an armor that is denied you. They are somehow blunted... They enjoy life hugely, yet they are not sensitive to it."

"For all I knew, I was dying, and I have been much relieved to find that I was not at all afraid. Death seemed cold and dark and lonely, but I seemed to be looking down a straight road over-arched by trees, and the road simply went on with no end in sight, and there was no fear or dread or terror in the thought of going down it. I was interested afterward to remember I had felt this way."

"It seems painfully bigoted to attribute degeneracy to anyone living a simpler more difficult life than one's own - to drink moonshine and yet condemn moonshining."

[Olivia Loving · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good example of all the brilliant mid-century lit crit that has been forgotten.

[Marsha]

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