Topic: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (August 8, 1896 – December 14, 1953) was an American author who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn, won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later made into a movie, also known as The Yearling. The book was written long before the concept of young-adult fiction, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.

Marjorie Kinnan was born in 1896 in Washington, DC, to Frank, an attorney for the US Patent Office, and Ida Traphagen Kinnan. She grew up in the Brookland neighborhood and was interested in writing as early as age six, and submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16. At age 15, she entered a story titled "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty," for which she won a prize.

She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she joined Kappa Alpha Theta sorority and received a degree in English in 1918, and met Charles Rawlings while working for the school literary magazine. Kinnan briefly worked for the YWCA editorial board in New York, and married Charles in 1919. The couple moved to Louisville, Kentucky writing for the Louisville Courier-Journal and then Rochester, New York both writing for the Rochester Journal, and Marjorie writing a syndicated column called "Songs of the Housewife."