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.