Florida Women Writers - the University Press of Florida presents Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was born in Washington, D.C. in August of 1896. She started writing when she was only six years old and graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a major in English. She went on to work as a reporter at a newspaper and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1939 for "The Yearling."

However, her personal life was not as steady as her professional life. She married twice, smoked 5 1/2 packs of cigarettes a day, and was prone to moods of depression and drunken fits. She died at the age of 57 in St. Augustine, but is remembered through her many stories of the people at Cross Creek.

Max and Marjorie

The Correspondence between Maxwell E. Perkins
and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Edited by Rodger L. Tarr

This compelling collection of letters brings together for the first time the entire known correspondence--nearly 700 letters, notes, and wires--of the preeminent 20th-century American editor and his Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
1999. 464pp. 6 X 9.
Cloth, $34.95. 0-8130-1691-6

Idella Parker

From Reddick to Cross Creek

by Idella Parker with Bud and Liz Crussell

This book is the one Idella Parker's fans begged her to write--the illustrated story that tells what happened before and after she worked for Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (described in Idella's earlier memoir) and adds frank new details about her years as cook, housekeeper, and confidante to Florida's Pulitzer Prize winner.

1999. 240pp. 5 ½ X 8 ½.

Cloth, $19.95. 0-8130-1706-8

Other books edited by Rodger L. Tarr:

Poems by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1997)

"A fascinating tapestry woven from the lives of women who had won the right to vote a mere six years earlier. In Songs of a Housewife, we hear the voice of an emerging feminist, a voice that stubbornly and--given the political climate of the 1920s--courageously insists that women be respected. Fans of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings will be surprised and ultimately delighted by this long overdue collection."--Connie May Fowler, author of Sugar Cage and Before Women Had Wings

288pp.

Cloth, $24.95. ISBN 0-8130-1491-3

Short Stories by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1994)

Like others who wrote about the South, Rawlings grappled with the problem of how to portray honestly, yet without racism, the situation and the language of her neighbors. Her empathetic description of blacks and her portrayal of the Florida Cracker contribute a valuable perspective on twentieth-century American culture in transition.

386pp.

Photographs, notes, index.

Cloth, $49.95s. ISBN 0-8130-1252-X
Paper, $24.95. ISBN 0-8130-1253-8

The Creek (1993)
by J.T. Glisson.
Foreword by Rip Torn.

In her 25 years at the Creek, Miz Rawlings was regarded as "That Woman"--warm, high-strung, and simply eccentric. She drove recklessly, smoked in public, and had "black spells." A Pulitzer Prize did little to change her status. In Cross Creek everyone had space to be a character and every character had a title: the meanest, laziest, most pregnant, or best cat fisherman.

283pp. 19 drawings, map.

Cloth, $29.95. 0-8130-1184-1
Paper, $16.95. 0-8130-1185-X

Idella: Marjorie Rawlings' "Perfect Maid" (1992)

by Idella Parker, with Mary Keating

156pp. Photographs.

Cloth, $24.95. ISBN 0-8130-1143-4
Paper, $13.95. ISBN 0-8130-1144-2

Invasion of Privacy: The Cross Creek Trial of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1988)

by Patricia Acton

175pp. Notes, sources, index.

Cloth, $27.95. ISBN 0-8130-0906-5
Paper, $14.95. ISBN 0-8130-0908-1

Frontier Eden: The Literary Career of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1966)

by Gordon E. Bigelow

162pp. Illustrations, maps, index.

Paper, $17.95. ISBN 0-8130-0672-4

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born in Minneapolis in 1890. She graduated in 1912 from Wellesley College and later joined her father's newspaper business in Miami. In the 1940's she started turning her attention to the Everglades and formed Friends of the Everglades when she was in her 70's. Even into her 80's and 90's (when she was legally blind) she fought to protect what many considered just Florida swamp, becoming known as the grandmother of the Everglades. She died in 1998, after having received such awards as Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year (1988), and the Presidential Medal of Honor (1993).

"A River in Flood" and Other Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1998)

Edited by Kevin M. McCarthy
Illustrations by Larry Leshan

The timeless themes of her stories in this new collection resonate with interest for readers today. Whether the subject is hurricanes, cockfighting, real estate deals, struggling immigrants, or corruption in the Everglades, Douglas wrote about it with distinction--and usually first. Originally published in the Saturday Evening Post during the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of the short story, these nine works have never before been collected or available in one place.

A Florida Sand Dollar Book

176 pp. 6 X 9.

9 illustrations.

Cloth, $39.95s ISBN 0-8130-1622-3
Paper, $17.95 ISBN 0-8130-1623-1

Nine Florida Stories by Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1990)

Edited by Kevin M. McCarthy

A Florida Sand Dollar Book

The nine stories in this first collection, satisfyingly diverse in plot and theme, take place in a scattering of South Florida settings--Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, the Tamiami Trail, the Keys, Hillsboro Inlet, the Everglades. In among the drama of hurricanes and plane crashes, of kidnappers, escaped convicts, and smugglers, Douglas plants flags that mark the stories as her own: plume hunters who threaten Florida's ibises, irrational schemes to drain the Everglades, what happens when human beings collide with nature in the form of water, weather, or wildlife.

198pp.

ISBN 0-8130-0988-X Cloth $22.95s
ISBN 0-8130-0994-4 Paper, $17.95

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born about 1811. She frequently visited the South and learned of the customs of the states that practiced slavery. She wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin for The National Era at Washington and in 1852 had it published into a book. The book sold five hundred thousand copies within five years and Harriet Beecher Stowe, already a locally known writer, won national acclaim. She died around 1896.

Beechers, Stowes, and Yankee Strangers: The Transformation of Florida(1999)

by John T. Foster and Sarah Whitmer Foster

Modern Florida--a world of tourists, retirees from the North, and novel agricultural crops--began among a group of Yankee reformers at the end of the Civil War, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her brother, Charles, who lived in Florida between 1867 and 1885. This book tells the story of the group--and their designs for a postwar Florida--with the action, atmosphere, and insight of a good novel.

The Florida History and Culture Series

132pp. 6 X 9.
11 b&w photos, map, notes, bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1646-0 Cloth, $24.95