American · 1913–1984
Wilson Rawls (1913-1984) was born Woodrow Wilson Rawls near Scraper, in the Cherokee Nation area of what is now Oklahoma, and grew up without a school nearby, reading borrowed books and teaching himself to write by copying the styles of Jack London and Zane Grey. He worked as an itinerant carpenter across the American West and Alaska for decades, writing in his spare time and, discouraged, burning several manuscripts before marrying Sophie Styczinski in 1958. At her urging he rewrote a story from memory: Where the Red Fern Grows (1961), about a boy and his two coonhounds in the Ozarks, became a defining novel of American childhood reading and a perennial classroom assignment, later adapted into film twice. He followed it with Summer of the Monkeys (1976), a Newbery Honor book. Rawls had little formal education and no other publications beyond these two novels, but both remain continuously in print and widely taught.