In the preface to The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society, the first nonfiction book on the people of the Ozark region, Vance Randolph confessed that he sought to entertain general readers with stories of a place divorced from the march of time, its inhabitants a people whose isolation and hidebound dedication to the ways of their ancestors rendered them exotic relics in an age of electricity, radios, and automobiles. Randolph knew he was presenting to his audience an incomplete picture of his adopted region, a place more complex and heterogeneous than even he could appreciate. Yet, his decision to essentialize Ozark people and their culture set a precedent that other chroniclers of the Ozarks would dutifully and willingly follow. Whether infused with a romantic fascination for ancient ballads, fox hunters, and weaving grannies or informed by a modernist critique of the intellect-stultifying poverty and backwardness of the benighted hill country, these chronicles all agreed that “the average urban American” who visited the region would feel “himself among an alien people.” The tens of thousands of readers of these books were almost certain to convert generalizations—and generations—into regional stereotypes.
The Ozark books of the Depression era played a crucial role in establishing the simplistic and reductionist stereotypes, both positive and negative, of Ozarkers and the Ozarks. It is for that reason that the University of Arkansas Press has launched the Chronicles of the Ozarks, a reprint series that will make available some of the era’s Ozark books with introductions and editorial notes that place each book and its author against the backdrop of the era and its popular assumptions and myths of life in the Ozarks. While it is important to understand the books’ flaws and misconceptions in the interest of a fuller understanding of the development and persistence of regional stereotypes, it is also important to remember that these books were written to entertain an audience of general readers and that none of them was meant to be a scholarly, scientific study. It is our hope that you will find them as entertaining as did readers in the 1930s and 1940s. It is also our hope that you will read them with an appreciation for the image-shapers that they once were and for the cultural artifacts that they have become.
Series Editor
Brooks Blevins is widely recognized as the foremost scholar of Ozarks history. The Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, Blevins teaches a variety of Ozark-themed courses, from Ozarks history to literature of the Ozarks. He is the author of a number of books and articles on the history of the region, most notably the three-volume History of the Ozarks (University of Illinois Press), which has become the definitive history of the region. He is also the author of the award-winning Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State (2009) and coeditor with Gene Hyde of John Quincy Wolf’s Life in the Leatherwoods (2000), both published by the University of Arkansas Press.
Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America by Kimberly Harper has won the 2025 Missouri Conference on History Book Award. Robert Boatright was one of Middle America’s greatest confidence men. Although little...
Mob Rule in the Ozarks: The Missouri and North Arkansas Railroad Strike, 1921-1923 by Kenneth Barnes, has been reviewed by Maylon Rice in the Fort Smith Historical Society Journal. “This well written and meticulously researched volume by Kenneth Barnes, distinguished...
Kim Harper has reviewed Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks in the most recent issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. “Kelly’s biography of Lucile Morris Upton chronicles the life of an Ozarks journalist, recounts the tension between Ozarks romanticists and progressives...
Dan Miller has reviewed Broadcasting the Ozarks: Si Siman and Country Music at the Crossroads by Kitty Ledbetter and Scott Foster Siman at Bluegrass Unlimited. “Although this new book about the country music scene in Springfield, Missouri (from the 1930s through the...
Sarah Neidhardt and her mother Wendy McPhee joined Ken Jones at KBOO in Portland to talk about Sarah's memoir Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods. You can listen to a recording of the show at KBOO. Sarah Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the...
Broadcasting the Ozarks: Si Siman and Country Music at the Crossroads has been reviewed in the Missouri Historical Review. “Like most creative scenes that unexpectedly blossom, Springfield was willed to prominence by a single person: Si Siman, who helped develop the...
Steve Yates has reviewed Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America by Kimberly Harper in the December issue of OzarksWatch Magazine. “Only a historian and writer of Harper’s caliber," writes Yates, "could cope with...
Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods by Sarah Neidhardt has been reviewed in the October 2024 issue of the Missouri Historical Review. “By not glorifying the BTTL (back to the land) movement, Twenty Acres will help scholars consider harder questions about...
Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America by Kimberly Harper has been reviewed in the October 2024 issue of the Missouri Historical Review. “Harper’s dogged research in archives, court records, and newspapers across...
Newspaperwoman of the Ozarks: The Life and Times of Lucile Morris Upton by Susan Croce Kelly has won the 2024 Missouri Literary Award, given by the Missouri Library Association. Lucile Morris Upton landed her first newspaper job out West in the early 1920s, then...
