The Yearling

Summary

In the scrub country of post-Civil War Florida, a lonely farm boy named Jody Baxter adopts an orphaned fawn and grows attached to it as he comes of age alongside his hardworking parents. Rawlings draws on her years living among Florida "Cracker" homesteaders to render the landscape, dialect, and rhythms of subsistence farm life with affectionate precision. The novel's tender handling of childhood, nature, and loss has kept it in print as a classic of American coming-of-age fiction.