Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was an American author whose work served as the source material for a Japanese anime television series. She was born on August 8, 1896, in Washington, D.C., and died on December 14, 1953, in St. Augustine, Florida. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, she initially worked as a reporter and feature writer before moving to a rural orange grove in Cross Creek, Florida, in 1928. This environment profoundly shaped her literary voice, inspiring her novels about the region's people and wilderness.

Rawlings is best known for her 1938 novel The Yearling, a story about a boy named Jody Baxter who adopts an orphaned fawn in the Florida scrub country. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 and was adapted into a classic live-action film in 1946.

The connection to anime comes from the 1983 Japanese animated television series titled The Yearling, known in Japanese as Kojika Monogatari (子鹿物語) or alternatively as Fortunate Fawn. This 52-episode series, which aired on NHK from November 1983 to January 1985, was produced by MK Company in association with MGM/UA Television and directed by Masaaki Ōsumi. While Rawlings passed away decades before the anime's production, she is consistently credited as the original creator, with the series being an adaptation of her 1938 novel. The anime is noted for being based not only on the book but also on the 1946 MGM film adaptation. In this context, Rawlings' role is that of the original source material author, not a direct participant in the anime's creation.

Recurring themes in Rawlings' original literary works include a deep connection to nature, the struggles of rural life, and the bittersweet transition from childhood to adulthood. Her writing is celebrated for its poetic prose, authentic regional dialect, and its ability to convey a profound sense of kinship with the natural world. These elements are directly reflected in the anime adaptation, which is described as a slice-of-life story set in the 1800s Florida wilderness, focusing on the boy Jody, his family, and his relationship with his pet deer, Flag.

In terms of industry significance, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is a major figure in American literature, and her work The Yearling holds the status of a classic. Her significance to the anime industry is more specific and historical. The 1983 anime adaptation of The Yearling is notable for a technical milestone: the second episode is recognized as the world's first full digital production, marking an early use of computer graphics in television animation. While the series itself was not a major commercial success and has since become relatively obscure, it represents an interesting case of a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novel being adapted into a Japanese anime, showcasing the global reach of Rawlings' storytelling.