Yearling, The

New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938. A Fine First Edition of 'The Yearling' - Winner of the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

RAWLINGS, Marjorie Kinnan. The Yearling. Decorations by Edward Shenton. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938.

First edition, first printing with Scribner "A" and seal printed on the copyright page.

Octavo (6 1/4 x 5 5/8 inches; 209 x 143 mm.). [viii], 428 pp. With 34 woodcut chapter-headings (including illustration on title-page).

Publisher's cream linen over boards, front cover decorated and titled in green,spine lettered in green.

A fine copy in a near fine dust jacket with just a couple of tiny closed tears on the lower edge.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1895-1953) was an American writer who lived in rural Florida and wrote novels with rural themes and settings. Her best known work, The Yearling, is about a boy, Jody Baxter, who becomes friends with a young fawn after his father kills the fawn's mother. It was the best-selling novel in the United States in 1938, and sold more than 250,000 copies. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939 and was later, in 1946, made into a movie of the same name starring Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. The book was written before the concept of young adult fiction arose, but is now commonly included in teen-reading lists.

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.

"The thing about The Yearling, its great claim to distinction, is that it is able to make so much of simple, homely events" (Contemporary New York Times review).

Edward Shenton (1895-1977) was an American illustrator, author, editor, poet, and teacher.