Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings - Personal Life

Personal Life

With money she made from The Yearling, Rawlings bought a beach cottage at Crescent Beach, ten miles south of St. Augustine.

In 1941 Rawlings married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin (1901–1997), and he remodeled an old mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine (currently the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum). After World War II, he sold the hotel and managed the Dolphin Restaurant at Marineland, which was then Florida's number one tourist attraction. Rawlings and Baskin made their primary home at Crescent Beach, and Rawlings and Baskin both continued their respective occupations independently. When a visitor to the Castle Warden Hotel suggested she saw the influence of Rawlings in the decor, Baskin protested, saying, "You do not see Mrs. Rawlings' fine hand in this place. Nor will you see my big foot in her next book. That's our agreement. She writes. I run a hotel." After purchasing her land in New York, Rawlings spent half the year there and half the year with Baskin in St. Augustine.

Her singular admitted vanity was cooking. She said, "I get as much satisfaction from preparing a perfect dinner for a few good friends as from turning out a perfect paragraph in my writing."

Rawlings befriended and corresponded with Mary McLeod Bethune and Zora Neale Hurston. Zora Neale Hurston visited her at Cross Creek. But in keeping with race relations of the time, she was made to sleep with Idella, the black maid, in the "tenant house", not in Marjorie's house. Her views on race relations were much different than her neighbors, castigating white Southerners for infantalizing African Americans and labeling their economic differences with whites "a scandal", but simultaneously considered whites superior. She described her African-American employee Idella as "the perfect maid". Their relationship is described in the book Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' "Perfect Maid", by Idella Parker and Mary Keating.

Biographers have noted her longing for a male child through her writings, as far back as her first story as a teenage girl in, "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty", and repeated throughout several works, letters, and characters, most notably in The Yearling. In fact, she stated that as a child she had a gift for telling stories, but that she demanded all her audiences be boys.

Her hatred of cities was intense: she wrote a sonnet titled, "Having Left Cities Behind Me" published in Scribner's in 1938 to illustrate it (excerpt):

"Now, having left cities behind me, turned
Away forever from the strange, gregarious
Huddling of men by stones, I find those various
Great towns I knew fused into one, burned
Together in the fire of my despising..."

She was criticized throughout her career for being uneven with her talent in writing, something she recognized in herself, and that reflected periods of depression and artistic frustration. She has been described as having unique sensibilities; she wrote of feeling "vibrations" from the land, and often preferred long periods of solitude at Cross Creek. She was known for being remarkably strong-willed, but after her death, Norton Baskin wrote of her, "Marjorie was the shyest person I have ever known. This was always strange to me as she could stand up to anybody in any department of endeavor but time after time when she was asked to go some place or to do something she would accept -'if I would go with her.'"

Rawlings died in 1953 in St. Augustine of a cerebral hemorrhage. She bequeathed most of her property to the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she taught creative writing in Anderson Hall. In return, her name was given to a new dormitory dedicated in 1958 as Rawlings Hall which occupies prime real estate in the heart of the campus. Her land at Cross Creek is now the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. Norton Baskin survived her by 44 years, passing away in 1997. They are buried side-by-side at Antioch Cemetery near Island Grove, Florida. Rawlings' tombstone, with Baskin's inscription, reads "Through her writing she endeared herself to the people of the world." Rawlings' reputation has managed to outlive those of many of her contemporaries. A posthumously-published children's book, The Secret River, won a Newbery Honor in 1956, and movies were made, long after her death, of her story "Gal Young 'Un", and her semi-fictionalized memoir Cross Creek (Norton Baskin, then in his eighties, made a cameo appearance in the latter movie).

In 2008, the United States Postal Service unveiled a stamp bearing Rawlings' image, in her honor.