Rawlings Book Cornucopia of Great American Writers, Says Researcher

October 21, 1999

GAINESVILLE — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings did more for literature than win the Pulitzer Prize. According to a new book published by University Press of Florida, she cheered up an ailing F. Scott Fitzgerald, encouraged Thomas Wolfe to be less wordy and went fishing with Ernest Hemingway.

The first published collection of the entire correspondence between Rawlings and Maxwell E. Perkins, recognized by many as the foremost 20th-century American editor, sheds new light on their relationship and on the major literary figures of the 30s and 40s, said Rodger L. Tarr, University Distinguished Professor at Illinois State University and author of the book “Max and Marjorie: The Correspondence between Maxwell E. Perkins and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.”

“Perkins is the renowned editor of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wolfe,” Tarr said. “But few people know he found Rawlings if not in a professional sense their equal, certainly in a personal sense he treated her as their equal.”

Tarr, who did his research at the University of Florida’s Smathers Library special collections and at Princeton University, said the 698 letters, notes and telegrams included in the book contain not only important new information about Fitzgerald, Wolfe and Hemingway, but Perkins as well. Rawlings arranged in 1950 to donate her manuscripts and papers to UF.

When Perkins pressed Rawlings to visit and cheer up an ill and despondent Fitzgerald, she drove to the Asheville, N.C., inn where he was convalescing, Tarr said.

“They spent the whole day together — wined and dined and laughed and cried,” Tarr said. “Both of them were always unhappy with the state of their lives, which is very typical of such sensitive personalities. Rawlings not only helped Fitzgerald; he helped Rawlings as well.”

Perkins also summoned Rawlings to New York to persuade Wolfe — notorious for writing lengthy manuscripts — not to be so verbose. And it was through Perkins that Rawlings met Hemingway, becoming good friends and fishing with him in Bimini, Tarr said.

Although Hemingway visited Rawlings and her husband Norton Baskin at their oceanfront cottage near St. Augustine, neither Hemingway nor Perkins accepted Rawlings’ earlier invitations to hunt with her at her home in Cross Creek, Tarr said. In a letter to Hemingway, Perkins fretted that it would look odd to stay in a remote area of Florida with a then-divorced woman, so he never stopped to visit her on his trips to Key West to visit Hemingway, he said.

Perkins, the sophisticated, urbane editor, had little in common with Rawlings, the earthy, remote orange grower, but their partnership was the single most important influence on Rawlings’ literary life, Tarr said. In fact, Tarr’s book reveals how Perkins participated in the actual writing of Rawlings’ books.

It was Perkins’ idea that Rawlings write a “boy’s book” about life in rural Florida among the Crackers, which led to “The Yearling,” her 1939 Pulitzer Prize winner, Tarr said. And it was Perkins who supplied the unifying metaphor for her equally celebrated book “Cross Creek.”

“Perkins was more than an editor,” Tarr said. “He was her second voice, one might almost say her silent voice. He supplied language, metaphors and plot and he encouraged her to alter her works in a way that would make them suitable for Scribner’s (publishing).” In “The Yearling,” she removed parts of the book he suggested were off-color, he said.

In turn, Rawlings suggested writers to Perkins, including Zora Neale Hurston, who sent manuscripts to Perkins for publication, he said.

As Rawlings and Perkins’ personal relationship blossomed, she advised him on topics as diverse as religion, politics, race and philosophy, Tarr said. She especially liked to discuss her transcendental beliefs, and each related details of their marriages.

After Perkins’ death, Rawlings struggled to finish her last novel “The Sojourner,” which finally was published six years later, never to receive the acclaim of her earlier novels. “When Perkins died suddenly in 1947, Rawlings’ literary lamp went out,” Tarr said.