My dear Mr. Perkins: 

 Your recent question as to the possibility of my doing a novel makes me wish I might talk with you, for I am vibrating with material like a hive of bees in swarm. It would take pages of necessarily vague ramblings to discuss it. At present I see four books very definitely. Two of them need several more years of note-taking. Of the two I am about ready to begin on, one would be a novel of the scrub country [South Moon Under]. I managed to get lost in the scrub, the first day of the hunting season--and I encountered for the first time the palpability of silence. 
 So isolated a section gives a value to the scattered inhabitants. There is a handful of fascinating characters ready to be woven into the fabric of the story. So far, I have not come on the necessary thread of continuity. When it occurs to me, I think it will force me to drop whatever else I may be doing. Once I know where I am going, the book will almost write itself. 
 The novel that I should like to postpone a little, but that I shall probably begin on, will be called “Hammock” [Golden Apples]. A few miles away on the road to Micanopy, we cross a strange, unearthly stream that has overflowed into the hammock itself. It is called, inexplicably, the River Styx. It seemed to me that it might well have been so named by one of the young Englishmen, remittance men, who colonized a section around Orange Lake in the middle and late ‘80s--younger sons in disgrace, subsidized to stay away. Some of them planted orange groves; others, I am told, pretended to, sending home mythical accounts of their development. 
 There took shape in my mind one of these young men, to whom, coming into this jungle hammock, an embittered exile, the strange small river would indeed seem another Styx, transporting him from life into death. To his nature as I conceived it, this country would be intolerable. This region is beautiful, but it is like a beautiful woman capable of a deep evil and a great treachery. Back of the lushness is something stark and sinister... 
 ...The book could become, incidentally, one of several things; possibly something of a study in the relativity of beauty... 

Sincerely, 
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings