Rawlings immersed herself in their way of life by doing the "illegal things" that they did to the point that she began to lose a sense of the boundary that had previously existed between her old, sophisticated northern self and her current one: "It is so easy for me to live their life with them, that I am in some danger of losing all sophistication and perspective. I feel hurried sometimes, as though I must get `written out' in this country within the next few years, because so much is no longer strange or unusual to me" (45). In this statement she is showing the strong empathy she developed for her Cracker friends which she would eventually convey to her fictional characters. Her vision would culminate in The Yearling, which powerfully evokes the scrub life she lived with the Fiddias and other scrub friends, including Cal Long and Barney Dillard, who taught her how to hunt and fish, identify plants and animals, and survive in the wild. The book won her the 1939 Pulitzer Prize and fans worldwide.
(excerpt from The M. K. Rawlings Society)