Air Date: Week of October 18, 1996

Facts about... the novel The Yearling.

Transcript

CURWOOD: Somewhere, beyond the sinkhole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side and were gone forever. So ends Marjorie Kinnon Rawlings' The Yearling. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel set in the scrub flats of Florida, Ms. Rawlings takes readers to a place most tourists never see and touches us with the story of a boy and his unmanageably growing fawn. It's been 100 years since Marjorie Rawlings was born in Washington, DC. She moved to the remote town of Cross Creek, Florida, in 1928 with a single mission, to write. And she did. She produced 5 novels, some stories, and Cross Creek, a book-length essay of her adopted hometown. In it she wrote, "When I came to the creek and knew the old grove and farm house that once was home, there was some terror such as one feels in the first recognition of human love, for the joining of person to place as of person to person is a commitment to shared sorrow, to shared joy. And for this week that's the Living on Earth Almanac.