The Yearling

The Yearling is a novel by American writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, published in March 1938. It was the main selection of the Book of the Month Club in April 1938. It won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1938, when it sold more than 250,000 copies. It was the seventh-best seller in 1939. The book has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian, and 22 other languages. Rawlings's editor was Maxwell Perkins, who also worked with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary luminaries. She had submitted several projects to Perkins for his review, and he rejected them all. He advised her to write about what she knew from her own life, and The Yearling was the result. Plot Young Jody Baxter lives with his parents, Ora and Ezra "Penny" Baxter, on a small farm in the backwoods of central Florida in the years following the Civil War. His parents had six other children before him, but they died in infancy. His mother has difficulty bonding with the boy. Jody loves the outdoors and his family. He has wanted a pet for as long as he can remember, but his mother says that they barely have enough food to feed themselves, let alone a pet.