Marjorie Rawlings's inspiration took off, and she began chronicling the events, people, and nature that surrounded her. She submitted her first creative work, "Cracker Chidlings," to Scribner's Magazine in 1930. This series of vignettes, which were not really full-fledged short stories, caught the attention of Maxwell Perkins, the editor of Scribner's great American novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. From the moment he first read her work, Perkins "realized he had a gem in the rough," according to Rodger Tarr (introduction to Max and Marjorie 2). Tarr explains the effect Perkins had on her work: "Early on she had very little sense of audience, or at least of the Scribner audience. She laced her work with a mixture of intellectualism and bawdiness that often defeated her purpose. She always captured essence but seldom fully grasped form. Perkins became her framer"
(Excerpt from the M. K. Rawlings Society)
Rawlings' early efforts focused on the romance genre. Encouraged by her editor, Maxwell Perkins, who was impressed by the letters she wrote him about her life in Cross Creek, she began writing stories set in the Florida scrub country. 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. Local reception to her stories was mixed between puzzlement of whom she was writing about and rage, as apparently one mother recognized her son as a subject in a story and threatened to whip Rawlings until she was dead.
(Excerpt From Wikipedia)