The Yearling, Rawlings, Grosset and Dunlap Movie Jacket, c. 1946–1950

The Piece

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, The Yearling, in the Grosset and Dunlap reprint bound in bright apple green cloth. The front board is stamped in black with Edward Shenton's figure of the boy Jody standing on a strip of ground with the fawn in his arms. The spine carries the title in script, the author in capitals, the Grosset and Dunlap imprint, and a leaf ornament at head and tail. The rear board is plain.

The title page repeats the Shenton device in its fuller form, the boy and the fawn against a sunburst with the Baxter cabins behind, credited Decorations by Edward Shenton, over the Grosset and Dunlap New York imprint. The copyright page reads 1938 by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, printed in the United States of America, all rights reserved without the permission of Charles Scribner's Sons, and at the foot, by arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons. There is no printing date.

Shenton's decorations open the chapters throughout. Jody lying in the rain among the clay furrows at chapter one. The doe leaping the fence away from Ma Baxter and her broom at chapter twenty two, page 271. They are cut in the manner of wood engraving, black and white and very sharp, and they are the reason this edition still has admirers.

What makes this copy unusual is what a previous owner did with the dust jacket. Rather than lose it, they cut it apart and taped it to the inside of the boards. The front endpaper carries the front panel and part of the spine, in color, Jody holding the fawn against the pines and the river, with an oval inset of Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman and the line about the Pulitzer Prize novel on which M-G-M based its motion picture. The rear endpaper carries the back panel, a black and white still of Peck, Wyman and Claude Jarman Jr. with the fawn, under the full film credits. The tape has aged to amber and the paper beneath it is stained, but the jacket is there and it is legible.

Pasted on the front free endpaper is an engraved bookplate, a steel-engraved Minute Man standing with his musket beside the plow, cannon smoke rising behind him, set inside a broken pediment under the words Ex Libris. The name below reads ICHARD S. KNAPP, the first letter lost where the plate meets the tape at the gutter.

History & Provenance

The Yearling was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in March 1938, edited by Maxwell Perkins, who had turned down several of Rawlings's earlier projects and told her to write instead about the Florida backcountry she had moved to. It was the best selling novel in the United States that year at more than 250,000 copies, the seventh best seller the year after, and it took the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1939. Edward Shenton illustrated it from the first edition onward, and his decorations carried over into the reprints.

The film took two attempts. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer started in 1941 with Spencer Tracy as Penny Baxter and Victor Fleming directing, hired Rawlings herself as consultant and location scout, renovated a cabin and built a town set in Florida, and shut the production down after three weeks of heat, insects and a cast with no appetite for the material. It was revived in 1945 under Clarence Brown, who cast Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman and, after a long search for a boy, Claude Jarman Jr. in his first film. It was released on 18 December 1946 and took Academy Awards for color art direction and color cinematography, with a Juvenile Award to Jarman, against nominations for picture, director, actor, actress and editing.

That release date is the floor for this copy. The jacket taped inside sells the film as current, so neither the jacket nor the printing it came off can predate the end of 1946. Grosset and Dunlap gave the reprint no printing date, and the firm kept the title in print for years afterward, so the upper end is an estimate rather than a fact. The run of the film tie-in jacket puts it in the late forties.

The bookplate is the Minute Man of Concord, Daniel Chester French's first major commission, unveiled on 19 April 1875 at the centennial of the fight at the North Bridge. French showed the farmer stepping away from his plow with his coat still draped over it, one hand on the musket. The image was reproduced constantly through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and stock engraved bookplates using it were sold by stationers to anyone who wanted one. It names an owner rather than a family: a reader who cared enough about his books to put his name in them, and enough about this one to save its jacket.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Green is the hard color to find on a shelf. Most cloth from this period is brown, maroon or navy, and a run of spines in those colors reads as one brown mass from across a room. This one is apple green, clean, and it does the work of three books.

It also happens to be a book people recognize, which matters when the shelf is in a room other people sit in. The Yearling is a Pulitzer novel, the best selling American novel of its year, and the source of a film that three generations saw. Shenton's decorations are genuinely good, and the copy opens flat enough to leave on a stand at the deer and the broom.

The thing that sets this copy apart is not bibliographic. It is that someone took a failing dust jacket, cut it into panels and taped it inside the covers so that it would survive, and then put his name on the facing page under a Minute Man. That is a reader's book, not a collector's, and it reads that way on a shelf of Americana, in a cabin or lake house, or propped open beside a run of green cloth.