The Yearling
by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Summary
Jody Baxter is the only surviving child of Penny and Ora Baxter, scratching a living from a clearing in the Florida scrub in the years after the Civil War. The Baxters' island of high ground sits in a wilderness of pine and palmetto, the nearest neighbours are the rough Forrester clan, and the year the novel covers is told almost entirely at the level of what the family eats, hunts, plants and loses.
Penny is snakebitten, and in the scramble to save him a doe is killed. Her fawn is left in the scrub, and Jody, who has wanted something of his own to love for the whole first stretch of the book, is allowed to raise it. He names it Flag. The middle of the novel is that companionship, written without a gram of cuteness: a boy and a half wild animal in country that Rawlings renders as exactly as any American landscape ever has been.
Then Flag grows into a yearling, and a yearling deer and a subsistence corn crop cannot share a clearing. What the family does, and what Jody is made to do, is the ending everybody remembers, and it is handled without mercy and without cruelty. Jody runs away, gets as far as a broken canoe and hunger, is picked up by a river boat, and comes home to his father changed.
Around four hundred pages, unhurried, and the hunting set pieces are as good as the grief.
Best for readers who met it young and suspect, correctly, that it was an adult novel all along.
Historical Context & Significance
The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1939. Published in March 1938, it was the bestselling novel in the United States that year, at over a quarter of a million copies.
It was in a real sense commissioned by an editor. Maxwell Perkins, who edited Hemingway and Fitzgerald at Scribner's, had turned aside Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's earlier ideas and told her to write what she knew from her own life, which was the scrub country around Cross Creek, the Florida hamlet where she had settled, and whose people and seasons she had been recording for years. Cross Creek, her 1942 memoir of the place, is the companion piece, and the 1983 film named for it told her story.
The 1946 film starred Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman, both Oscar nominated, and Claude Jarman Jr took the Academy Juvenile Award as Jody. The book settled afterwards into school editions and the children's shelf, which is where most readers now find it, a fate Rawlings did not intend but which has kept it continuously read for nearly ninety years.