The Private Marjorie

The letters, written to her second husband, Norton S. Baskin, from 1938 to her death in 1953, present a sharply drawn picture of the nation as it struggled through the end of the Depression, World War II, and the beginning of the Cold War era, as well as a picture of Rawlings's intriguing life, which ranged from the Florida scrub to the New York literary scene. Above all, they reveal the temperamental writer at her most human - candid, lonely, insecure, bawdy, generous, and always fortified by her love for Baskin.