The audience of good books for children, as everyone knows, has no age limits. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author of The Yearling (1938), did not set out to write a children's classic, nor did she ever consider herself a children's author. Yet in creating Jody Baxter and his pet deer, Flag, she endeared herself to millions of child readers and became one of America's most beloved children's authors.

The Yearling was an enormously popular success from the time of its publication in April 1938. It became a best-seller, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1939; a popular film version appeared in 1946: it has been translated into thirteen languages. And it has lived on now for nearly a half-century with a secure place on library shelves and in children's hearts, because it has the timeless appeal of a great literary work: unforgettable characters, well-developed, made "real...