Author Profile, Wilson Rawls

Kevin Coolidge

It’s a cold night with rain beating against the window – a good night for sleeping. Well, it would be if my neighbor’s dog would only settle down and quit his yowling. Just what is causing that dog to bark so? I go to the door and in the yard I see an old hound pawing through the garbage. His coat is mud-caked and his fur stretched tight over a bony frame. I start to talk to him, “Come here, boy. It’s all right. Come on.”

Limping up with his head bowed and his long tail thumping, I see he has no tags, only a simple collar. He doesn’t belong to anyone in this neighborhood. I raise one of his paws and read his story. His pads are worn and ragged. He has come a long way, and doubtless has a long way to go. I feed him some hamburger left from supper. The old boy, growing restless, whimpers and heads into the darkness.

Sleep isn’t going to come easy tonight. It’s time to grab a good book. I go over to my bookshelf and pick up Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. It’s one of the great American dog stories. But it’s more than a dog story: it’s about life in the Ozark Mountains before the Great Depression, and it’s about hunting, which means it’s also about death. Interestingly, it’s also a book that came close to not being published.

Wilson Rawls was born “Woodrow Wilson Rawls” in 1913 in the Oklahoma Ozarks. There were no public schools, and Rawls was home-schooled by his mother. He had little interest in reading, thinking that all books were “girl stories”. All that changed when he read a story of a man and a dog – that book was Jack London’s Call of the Wild. Rawls became a voracious reader and began to dream of writing his own book.

In 1928, his family moved to West Virginia, and Rawls started attending high school until he was forced to leave when the Great Depression began. During this time, Rawls bounced from place to place as an itinerant handyman. Along the way, he began to write stories, but without a formal education, his spelling and grammar kept them unsold, and the stories remained hidden in his traveling trunk

In 1958 he married, and, not wanting Sophie, his wife-to-be, to know about his failed dreams, he burned all of the tales he had written. Eventually his wife learned of the burned manuscripts and encouraged him to start writing again. Hesitantly, he rewrote a short story, this time typed and edited by Sophie, and in 1961, it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and was called The Hounds of Youth, which would later become Where the Red Fern Grows.Wilson Rawls wrote one more book, Summer of the Monkeys before he died in 1984 at the age of 71.

Where the Red Fern Grows and Summer of the Monkeys established a large following for Rawls. His work resonated with readers and critics alike. What he lacked in formal education Rawls more than made up with determination, grit and a love of writing. This young boy once shared his dream with his father, and his father gave him the encouraging advice, "Son, a man can do anything he sets out to do, if he doesn't give up." Rawls never forgot…

Buck? or Old Dan and Little Ann? Email me at frommyshelf@epix.net Sniff out past columns at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com Hobo says dogs might be man’s best friend, but cats are where it’s at, check out “Hobo Finds A Home”, a children’s book about a cat who found a friend and a home.