Washington, DC, born and Wisconsin educated, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an unlikely author of a coming-of-age novel about a poor central Florida child and his pet fawn?much less one that has become synonymous with Floridian literature writ large.

Rawlings was a tough, passionate, and independent woman who refused the early-twentieth-century conventions of her upbringing. Determined to exist outside her comfort zone, she found her voice in the remote hardscrabble life of Cross Creek, Florida. Between hunting alligator and managing an orange grove, Rawlings employed her sensitive eye, sharp ear for dialogue, and philosophical spirit to bring to life an unknown corner of America in vivid, tender detail?a feat that earned her the Pulitzer Prize in 1938.

The Life She Wished to Live paints a lively portrait of Rawlings, her contemporaries?including her legendary editor Maxwell Perkins and friends Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Hemingway?and the Florida landscape and people that inspired her.