Reviews and Endorsements:

"McCutchan is a sensitive observer of Rawlings’s work, and of her deeply unconventional life... It’s a pleasure to meet this cursing, hard-drinking, brilliant, self-destructive, car-wrecking, fun-loving, chain-smoking, alligator-hunting, moonshine-making, food-obsessed woman again on the page... Come to this biography for Rawlings’s outsize personality... Stay for the portrait of a woman whose writing meant everything to her." Dwight Garner, New York Times

“ In The Life She Wished to Live, a fascinating and lively new biography, Ann McCutchan sees Rawlings as a maverick who charted her own course. . . . masterly and entertaining . . . Rawlings had lived “the life she wished to live,” but she was ‘uneasy’ to the end.” Sarah Harrison Smith, Wall Street Journal

“McCutchan . . . has a graceful style enlivened by glints of wry humor. . . . The book re-creates the lush tropicality of north-central Florida in the 1930s and 1940s, before developers began to bulldoze over its natural wonders. And readers get a penetrating look at one driven writer's work process. . . . [A] vivid portrait of a woman who gave her all to do her best work.” Mary Ann Gwinn, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Who was she, really? It’s a question author Ann McCutchan answers brilliantly, with nuance and style, in her new biography of Rawlings.” Joy Wallace Dickinson, Orlando Sentinel

“McCutchan’s The Life She Wished to Live is the first major contemporary biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and it is a significant contribution to literary studies. In addition, this thoughtful book situates the novelist’s thinking about race and other issues within the historical context, providing a masterful analysis that will allow contemporary readers to approach Rawlings’ novels with increased understanding.” Hannah Joyner, Deep South

"An engaging, lively biography of an accomplished and complicated woman... All of it adds up to a rich portrait of a woman who loved Florida, and of a Florida that’s now all but vanished..” Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“Rawlings cleared her path through life as though armed with a machete; McCutchan, gracefully, records every chop.” Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun

"Absorbing, affectionate, and long overdue... McCutchan looks closely at Rawlings’ letters, stories, novels and memoirs and mines the ways they reveal Rawlings’ writerly mind... The Life She Wished to Live is the biography that Rawlings has long deserved." BookPage

“Florida native McCutchan captures Pulitzer Prize–winning Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' unconventional life, from her peripatetic girlhood to her great love, the beautiful, temperamental terrain of north-central Florida, in a well-paced and absorbing biography. She also succeeds, most notably, in presenting the author of the now classic coming-of-age novel, The Yearling, in her own voice, mirroring her impulse to let her characters speak for themselves. And what a life it is to record. From Rawlings’ fashionable if somewhat facile early publications to her emergence as a mature writer under the guidance of famed editor Maxwell Perkins, the singularity of her life shapes her work. Smudging her orange grove against an impending frost or convening with neighbors “on the fringe of life” is as crucial to her authorial development as encounters with Robert Frost and Thomas Wolfe or a foundation-shaking friendship with Zora Neale Hurston. One hopes that this appraisal of Rawlings leads to a revival of interest in her as both a chronicler of a time and place and an exacting practitioner of the writer’s craft.” Booklist

“It's been a quarter of a century since we've had a new biography of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Ann McCutchan delivers. From Rawlings' early newspaper days to the triumph of The Yearling, McCutchan shows us a writer of complexity, ambition, and conviction.  A deeply researched and satisfying read.” Martha Ackmann, author, THESE FEVERED DAYS: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

“How many contradictions can one life contain? Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings bridged the world of alligator hunting/orange growing/racially segregated early 20th century Florida and the world of legendary writers and elite New York-based editors. Ann McCutchan’s richly researched biography of the Pulitzer prize-winning author vividly portrays the uncompromising, hard-drinking and versatile Rawlings, who was equally at home wading through swamps as she was writing a novel or a cookbook, or conversing with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zora Neale Hurston and Robert Frost. The complexities of Rawlings’ massive inner insecurities and her outward, outsized personality make for a compelling and thoughtful biography.” Julie Dubrow, author, After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

“One knew Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings as the author of the haunting American classic The Yearling and of Cross Creek, her memoir of life on her Florida orange farm.  In Ann McCutchan’s welcome biography, we follow her evolution as a writer, glimpse her friendships with writers as various as Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Margaret Mitchell and Zora Neale Hurston, and witness her vibrant literary life.  Most striking is the fascinating account, unearthed from letters, of Rawlings’ personal struggle against what we would now call racist consciousness and her evolution as an ally of early 20th century struggles for social justice.” Honor Moore, author, Our Revolution, A Mother and Daughter at Midcentury

“An affectionate biography of the beloved author. . . . Work by work, McCutchan carefully details Rawlings’s gradual development as a professional writer who keenly absorbed [Cross Creek, Florida’s] history, culture, and dialects. . . . An all-inclusive and intimate assessment that could help Rawlings attract a new generation of readers.” Kirkus Reviews

“Writer Ann McCutchan’s (Marcel Moyse: Voice of the Flute) biography of the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Yearling is both an exploration of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s life and inspirations, and an insightful look at the ups and downs of the creative process. McCutchan reveals American journalist and writer Rawlings (1896-1953) as an iconoclast who shunned traditional female roles and modes of behavior, to the disappointment of her ambitious and controlling mother. Inheriting her father’s desire for farm life, Rawlings purchased a Florida orange grove in her early thirties, immersing herself in the culture and dialect of her rural neighbors and shaping her fiction around the theme of our uneasy coexistence with nature. Drawing upon Rawlings’s abundant surviving correspondence, McCutchan doesn’t shy away from exposing the temperamental behavior that often strained her subject’s relationships with friends and lovers, or the frequent mood swings – exacerbated by illness and excessive drinking – that complicated her work habits. McCutchan balances this by showing how Rawlings encouraged and inspired fellow writers, recognized and wrestled with her own racial prejudices, and became an advocate for conservation. A comprehensive, well-researched portrait of the life of Rawlings and her creative struggles that will engage a variety of readers.” Library Journal

Full Garden & Gun review here. See the MEDIA page for more reviews.

Interviews with Ann are included in this recent documentary by Sonya Doctorian, 2018:

Here is Home: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Cross Creek