Books: Enchanted Land

CROSS CREEK—Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings—Scribner ($2.50).

A dozen years ago Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings decided that she would never make a writer, quit her job on a Rochester, N.Y. newspaper, bought an orange grove at Cross Creek in Florida. There she wrote South Moon Under and The Yearling, a book that will be read, at least as a juvenile classic, when most of the books of the last 20 years are forgotten.

Cross Creek (Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April) is her reminiscent, unhurried, humorous account of how she discovered and took possession of a new U.S. literary...