The Sojourner

Rawlings' final novel, The Sojourner,-set in a northern setting, was about a boy who feels unwanted as his mother is distracted with missing his absent brother. In order 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 published 33 short stories from 1912 to 1949. Her editor was the legendary Maxwell Perkins of Scribner-s. Over the years, she built friendships with fellow writers Ernest Hemingway whom she met in 1936 and traded praises with about their writing, Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald whom she also met in 1936 when Fitzgerald was recuperating in the mountains in North Carolina, Robert Frost, and Margaret Mitchell.

Because many of Rawling's works were centered in the North and Central Florida area, she was often considered a regional writer. Rawlings herself rejected this label saying, "I don't hold any brief for regionalism, and I don't hold with the regional novel as such - don't make a novel about them unless they have a larger meaning than just quaintness."