The Woods Colt was first published in 1933. It’s a simple, fast-moving tale about a stubborn young hillbilly, Clint Morgan, a “woods colt.” Woods colt is a hill term for bastard, and the status more or less dooms Clint from the outset. He is without much schooling and has no prospects. He has one friend, … Continue reading The Woods Colt, by Thames Williamson

In a way, Back Yonder is a standard story of growing up in the backwoods of the Ozarks before the roads were good and the REA brought electricity. It covers what you’d expect: the crops for a subsistence lifestyle, home life in simple log or clapboard structures, what passed for schooling,  courtship rituals, wild goings-on … Continue reading Back Yonder: An Ozark Chronicle, by Wayman Hogue (1932, 2016)

For better or worse, The Shepherd of the Hills is the most famous Ozarks book. It’s an Arcadian novel, a European, sentimental style of romance in which a bucolic, or pastoral lifestyle is held up as a vanished ideal. Part of the conceit is that urban life is corrupt and enervating. This had resonance in … Continue reading The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), by Harold Bell Wright

My first memory of a library is from the summer of 1951, when I was four. My parents had bought a small farm south of Cabool, Missouri. The farm would hardly have supported a family in good times, but we scraped by with Dad’s earnings as an electrician. In 1952, we sold out at auction. … Continue reading Remote Access: Small Public Libraries in Arkansas (2021), by Sabine Schmidt and Don House