Wilson Rawls

Biography

Wilson Rawls (1913-1984) grew up in a log cabin in the Ozark hills of Cherokee County, Oklahoma — the exact setting of the novel. His family was poor, he had no formal schooling until his teens, and he hunted with his own redbone hounds as a boy. He taught himself to read and write largely from a copy of the Bible and Jack London's Call of the Wild. He worked for decades as a carpenter and construction worker, writing and rewriting the story of his dogs in spare moments. He burned an early draft, certain it was worthless. His wife found the surviving draft, read it, and told him it had to be published. He was forty-eight when it appeared in 1961. It became one of the bestselling children's novels of the twentieth century.

Wilson Rawls at a glance