8 /10 1 Votes
3.9/5 Barnes & Noble Language English Preceded by South Moon Under Genre Young adult fiction | 4/5 Goodreads Country United States Publication date 1938 Originally published March 1938 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Pages 416 (Mass Market Paperback) Page count 416 (Mass Market Paperback) Characters Fodder-wing Forrester, Jody Baxter, Ma Baxter Similar Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings books, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners, Fiction books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The yearling practical informative writing by writer marjorie kinnan rawlings
The Yearling is the 1938 novel written by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It was published in March 1938. It was the main selection of the Book of the Month Club in April 1938. It was the number one best seller for twenty-three consecutive weeks in 1938. As well as being the best-selling novel in America in 1938, it was the seventh-best in 1939. It sold over 250,000 copies in 1938. It has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Italian, Russian and twenty-two other languages. It won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1939.
Contents
- The yearling practical informative writing by writer marjorie kinnan rawlings
- The yearling original theatrical trailer
- Plot
- Characters
- Film TV theatrical or musical adaptations
- References
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 instructed her to write about what she knew from her own life, and the result of her taking his advice was The Yearling.
The yearling original theatrical trailer
Plot
Young Jody Baxter lives with his parents, Ora and Ezra "Penny" Baxter, in the animal-filled central Florida backwoods in the 1870s. His parents had six other children prior to Jody, but they died in infancy which makes it difficult for Ma Baxter to bond with him. Jody loves the outdoors and loves his family. He has wanted a pet for as long as he can remember, yet his mother, Ora, says they barely have enough food to feed themselves, let alone a pet.
A subplot involves the hunt for an old bear named Slewfoot that randomly attacks the Baxter livestock. Later the Baxters and Forresters get in a fight about the bear and continue to fight about nearly anything. (While the Forresters are presented as a disreputable clan, the disabled youngest brother, Fodder-Wing, is a close friend to Jody.) The Forresters steal the Baxters' hogs and, while Penny and Jody are out searching for the stolen stock, Penny is bitten in the arm by a rattlesnake. Penny shoots a doe--orphaning its young fawn--in order to use its liver to draw out the snake's venom, which saves Penny's life.
Jody convinces his parents to allow him to adopt the fawn--which, Jody later learns, Fodder-Wing had named "Flag"--and it becomes his constant companion. The book now focuses around Jody's life as he matures along with the fawn. The plot also centers on the conflicts of the young boy as he struggles with strained relationships, hunger, death of beloved friends, and the capriciousness of nature through a catastrophic flood. Jody experiences tender moments with his family, his fawn, and their neighbors and relatives. Along with his father, he comes face to face with the rough life of a farmer and hunter. Throughout, the well-mannered, God-fearing Baxter family and the good folk of nearby Volusia and the "big city," Ocala, are starkly contrasted against their hillbilly neighbors, the Forresters.
As Jody takes his final steps into maturity, he is forced to make a desperate choice between his pet, Flag, and his family. The parents realize that the growing Flag is endangering their very survival, as he persists in eating the corn crop on which the family is relying for their food the next winter. Jody's father orders him to take Flag into the woods and shoot him, but Jody cannot bring himself to do it. When his mother shoots the deer and wounds him, Jody is then forced to shoot Flag in the neck himself, killing the yearling. In blind fury at his mother, Jody runs off, only to come face to face with the true meaning of hunger, loneliness, and fear. After an ill-conceived attempt to reach an older friend in Boston in a broken-down canoe, Jody is picked up by a mail ship and returned to Volusia. In the end, Jody comes of age, assuming increasingly adult responsibilities--yet always surrounded with the love of family--in the difficult "world of men."
Characters
Film, TV, theatrical or musical adaptations
The novel was adapted into a film in 1946, starring Gregory Peck as Penny Baxter and Jane Wyman as Ora Baxter. Both were nominated for Oscars for their performances.
A Broadway musical adaption with music by Michael Leonard and lyrics by Herbert Martin was produced by The Fantasticks' producer Lore Noto in 1965. The book was written for the stage by Lore Noto and Herbert Martin. David Wayne and Delores Wilson played Ezra and Ora Baxter, and David Hartman, later of Good Morning America, was Oliver Hutto. The show itself only played three performances.
Barbra Streisand recorded four songs from the show: "I'm All Smiles", "The Kind of Man A Woman Needs", "Why Did I Choose You?", and the title song "My Pa".
A Japanese animated version (titled Kojika Monogatari) was released in 1983.
A 1994 television adaptation starred Peter Strauss as Ezra Baxter, Jean Smart as Ora Baxter, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Buck.
A 2003 poem, "Woodcliff Lake" by James Reiss, deals with The Yearling. The poem is from Reiss's book Riff on Six: New and Selected Poems.
A May 2012 episode of New Girl mistakenly referred to the scene where Jody attempts to shoo Flag as a scene from the Jack London novel White Fang. The expression "white fanging (someone)" was used in the episode to describe the act of reluctantly rejecting someone held very dear.
A 2012 song entitled "The Ballad of Jody Baxter", by singer/songwriter Andrew Peterson, deals with themes from The Yearling. The song is from his album Light for the Lost Boy.