Contents Introduction The Text of Parson BrooksParson Brooks: A Plumb Powerful Hard Shell Chapter I. The Ideal Home Chapter II. "From ignorance our comfort flows; / The only wretched are the wise." Chapter III. A Solemn Afterthought Chapter IV. The Flower of the Vale Chapter V. "Agin Skewls an' Edication" Chapter VI. "What Shall the Harvest … [Read more...] about Parson Brooks: A Plumb Powerful Hard Shell
2015 Ozarks Symposium Keynote Address by Steve Wiegenstein In his 1867 book Beyond the Mississippi, Albert D. Richardson writes about traveling the Ozarks in the late 1850s. While in Springfield he recorded the following anecdote: I was told of eight North Carolinians bound for Arkansas, who stopped for a few hours on the public square, and were asked innumerable … [Read more...] about The Lure of the Ozarks: What’s the Bait, and Who’s the Fish?
by J. Blake Perkins J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy topped the New York Times best-seller list within two months of its wonderfully timed release during the 2016 presidential election season. It finished 2017 as Amazon.com's second-best selling book of the year. Vance, who was born in 1984, is a self-described escapee from the troubled white working-class hill "culture" of his … [Read more...] about (Re)embracing Hill Mythology: A Critique of Hillbilly Elegy
by Lynn Morrow How often did twenty-something young women travel for a few hundred miles in carriages or wagons across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas during the Civil War? Probably more than we have imagined. Carrie Lenox and Eleanor King traveled out of Phelps County into northern and central Arkansas twice during 1864. Driven by the boldness of Carrie Lenox, her … [Read more...] about Secesh Women, Lenox Brothers, and the Elders’ Demise
by Carla Kirchner The United States and the world at large were first introduced to the Ozarks in literature through Harold Bell Wright's wildly popular novel, The Shepherd of the Hills. Though often too simplistic, didactic, and sentimental for modern readers, Wright's 1907 work was highly admired by readers at the time of publication and popularized the Ozarks Mountains … [Read more...] about A “whole ‘nother side of life”: Setting as Character in Daniel Woodrell’s Ozarks Novels