The book was written before the concept of young adult fiction arose but is now commonly included in teen reading lists.

[1][3] She grew up in the Brookland neighborhood and was interested in writing as early as age six; she submitted stories to the children's sections of newspapers until she was 16.

She was fascinated with the remote wilderness and the lives of Cross Creek residents, her Florida cracker neighbors, and felt a profound and transforming connection to the region and the land.

[10] Encouraged by her editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins, who was impressed by the letters she wrote him about her life in Cross Creek, Rawlings began writing stories set in the nearby Big Scrub.

[11] In 1930, Scribner's accepted two of her stories, "Cracker Chidlings" and "Jacob's Ladder", both about the poor, backcountry Florida residents who were quite similar to her neighbors at Cross Creek.

The book captures the richness of the Big Scrub and its environs in telling the story of a young man, Lant, who must support himself and his mother by making and selling moonshine, and what he must do when a traitorous cousin threatens to turn him in.

In 1942, Rawlings published Cross Creek, an autobiographical account of her relationships with her neighbors and her beloved Florida hammocks.

Cross Creek also was chosen by the Book of the Month Club and was released in an armed services edition (D-112), which was sent to servicemen during World War II.

To absorb the natural setting so vital to her writing, she bought an old farmhouse in Van Hornesville, New York, and spent part of each year there until her death.

Rawlings used Cason's forename in the book but described her in this passage:Zelma is an ageless spinster resembling an angry and efficient canary.

She combines the more violent characteristics of both and those who ask for or accept her ministrations think nothing at being cursed loudly at the very instant of being tenderly fed, clothed, nursed, or guided through their troubles.

Reportedly,[citation needed] Rawlings had been shocked to learn of Cason's reaction to the book and felt betrayed.

In Cross Creek, Rawlings describes how she owns 72 acres of land and also hires several people over the years to help her with day-to-day chores and activities.

Rawlings states in her autobiography "No maid of perfection—and now I have one—can fill the strange emptiness she left in a remote corner of my heart.

In 1941, Rawlings married Ocala hotelier Norton Baskin (1901–1997), and he remodeled an old mansion into the Castle Warden Hotel in St. Augustine, which currently houses the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum.

After World War II, he sold the hotel and managed the Dolphin Restaurant at Marineland, which was then Florida's number one tourist attraction.

Rawlings and Baskin made their primary home at Crescent Beach, and they continued their respective occupations independently.

Rawlings resisted social norms of the time in allowing Hurston, an African-American, to sleep in her home instead of relegating her to the tenant house.

Biographers have noted her longing for a male child through her writings, as far back as her first story as a teenage girl in "The Reincarnation of Miss Hetty", and repeated throughout several works, letters, and characters, most notably in The Yearling.

She has been described as having unique sensibilities; she wrote of feeling "vibrations" from the land and often preferred long periods of solitude at Cross Creek.

A posthumously published children's book, The Secret River, won a Newbery Honor in 1956, and movies were made long after her death of Gal Young Un and Cross Creek (Baskin made a cameo appearance in Cross Creek as a man sitting in a rocking chair).

[30] She was named a Great Floridian in 2009; the program honors persons who made “major contributions to the progress and welfare" of Florida.