Florida Vistas Book Club: The Life She Wished to Live

Event Description

Title: The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Author: Ann McCutchen

Join us for our next Florida history book club meeting, in person at the Cici and Hyatt Brown Museum of Art or virtually on ZOOM where we will be discussing the book, The Life She Wished to Live: A Biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

A comprehensive and engaging biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the beloved classic The Yearling. Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an unlikely author of a coming-of-age novel about a poor central Florida child and his pet fawn-much less one that has become synonymous with Florida literature writ large. Rawlings was a tough, ambitious, and independent woman who refused the conventions of her early-twentieth-century upbringing. Determined to forge a literary career beyond those limitations, she found her voice in the remote, hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. There, Rawlings purchased a commercial orange grove and discovered a fascinating world out of which to write-and a dialect of the poor, swampland community that the literary world had yet to hear. She employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life this unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail, a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Her accomplishments came at a price: a failed first marriage, financial instability, a contentious libel suit, alcoholism, and physical and emotional upheaval. With intimate access to Rawlings's correspondence and revealing early writings, Ann McCutchan uncovers a larger-than-life woman who writes passionately and with verve, whose emotions change on a dime, and who drinks to excess, smokes, swears, and even occasionally joins in on an alligator hunt. The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries-including her legendary editor, Maxwell Perkins, and friends Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald-and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her.

RSVP by calling the Museum at 386-255-0285 or register online. 

Admission: Free for members, $5.00 for future members.

Click Here to Register Online

*Upon registration, you will receive a ZOOM link to your email if you choose to attend virtually.