Wilson Rawls

Woodrow Wilson Rawls was born in 1913 in the Ozark Mountains near Scraper, Oklahoma. He had little formal schooling, but his mother taught him to read, and the wilderness adventure novels of Jack London gave him a love of books and a wish to write. During the Great Depression his family moved to New Mexico. As a young man Rawls worked as a carpenter and travelled to South America, Canada and Alaska. He wrote several manuscripts but, ashamed by his spelling and lack of punctuation, hid them in a trunk. While working near Idaho Falls, Idaho, he met Sophie Ann Styczinski, and they married in 1958. Before the wedding he burned his old manuscripts, but Sophie encouraged him to rewrite one of them, and she helped him edit it. The story, about a boy and his two coonhounds in the Ozarks, ran in the Saturday Evening Post and was published as the novel Where the Red Fern Grows in 1961. His second novel, Summer of the Monkeys, followed in 1976 and won many children's book awards. He died in 1984.

Wilson Rawls is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia