Following Up Success

A First Short Story Collection
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings,
When the Poor Whippoorwill.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940.  In jacket.  Tarr A 4.1.

This well-reviewed collection, published in April 1940, included most of Rawlings’s short fiction to this date, but excluded even her more important non-fiction pieces such as “Hyacinth Drift,” as well as some recent stories from the New Yorker and Collier’s.  The second of two copies in the collection is inscribed for “Eula Tucker, July 9 1940."

Rawlings in the New Yorker

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, “ The Pelican’s Shadow,” New Yorker (January 6, 1940): 17-19.
And: New Yorker (February 22, 1941), with Rawlings’s “ Jessamine Springs” (pp. 19-20). :

While Rawlings had got her first serious recognition from Scribner’s Magazine, she wrote for a wide variety of magazines in the 1930's and 1940's, and the success of The Yearling brought further invitations from editors.  Shown here is the first of several contributions to the New Yorker.

MGM’s Scouting Pictures in Florida for The Yearling

The movie rights in The Yearling had been sold to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1938, and in April 1939, Rawlings reported to Maxwell Perkins that “the MGM movie people were in Florida doing a Tarzan picture, and while here their camera man was commissioned to take shots of the Yearling country.  They gave me a set, and I’m sending them to you to forward to Wyeth as a loan.”  This album from the Middendorf Collection appears to be a set of those same  MGM scouting shots.  Also displayed for comparison is a publicity still from the eventual 1946 MGM movie, with Gregory Peck.