South Moon Under - Paperback

by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Author), Lauren Groff (Foreword by)

An often-overlooked early work--and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--by celebrated writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, now available in this Florida Edition with a new foreword for today's readers by Lauren Groff

Originally published in 1933, South Moon Under is the first novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Set in the Big Scrub of Florida, a sparsely inhabited backwoods near Rawlings's homestead at Cross Creek, the novel tells a multigenerational tale of the rural Lantry family and their struggle to eke out a living on the land. It depicts pioneer existence before Florida's twentieth-century tourism and development--and displays the literary powers that would earn Rawlings the Pulitzer Prize six years later for her novel The Yearling.

Introduced with a foreword by contemporary writer Lauren Groff, this edition of South Moon Under encourages today's readers to engage with this lesser-known work. With accounts of moonshining, logging and turpentining, hunting, cattle running, foodways, and frontier justice, Rawlings made an impact on American literary culture of her time by shining a light on the people and customs of the scrub. And in this book the Florida wilderness itself emerges as an unforgettable character, a force of its own alive with mystery, richly described by Rawlings alongside unsentimental stories of survival in a bygone century.

Author Biography

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) was an American novelist and short story writer who lived for 25 years in the small community of Cross Creek in rural Florida. Rawlings won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Yearling.