The writer John Mort has reviewed The Woods Colt on his blog, Down Along the Piney.
“As for the stereotypical characters, they rang true to me, much truer than the Arcadian hillfolk in The Shepherd of the Hills. The characters talk funny and make a lot of moonshine, but mostly they hate and love and scheme. The grannies are perhaps the most obvious stereotypes. The two young women, while narrowly drawn, ring true, and so does violent Clint. … The novel holds up because of the powerful story. To cite movies, it’s the plot of High Sierra, First Blood, and dozens of Westerns and adventure stories. A man alone, a man on the run, a man whose time has run out. Thank you, Phillip Howerton, and thank you, Arkansas, for bringing this great old yarn back to us.”
—John Mort, Down Along the Piney, February 2023
Although more than one hundred novels set in the Ozarks were published before it, Thames Ross Williamson’s 1933 novel The Woods Colt was the first to achieve notable success both popularly and critically. Written entirely in regional dialect, The Woods Colt is the story of the violent and reckless Clint Morgan, whose attempts to secure love and freedom force him down a path of self-destruction.
Simultaneously exploitative and romantic, The Woods Colt carries us back to the heart of the Great Depression, heyday of the hillbilly in pop culture, when the perceived self-reliance and old-fashioned wisdom of rural people allowed audiences to not only escape their current circumstances but also imagine more hopeful ways of living. Williamson, a prolific author, answered this interest with a fast-paced and action-driven novel filled with folklore that had, ostensibly, been authenticated by none other than renowned Ozarks expert Vance Randolph.
The Woods Colt, with its familiar sense of danger and adventure, continues to offer insight and entertainment as it wrestles with timeless themes of economic struggle, cultural conflict, and modernization. With an introduction and explanatory notes from Phillip Douglas Howerton, this new edition makes the seminal novel available once more to scholars, regional enthusiasts, and anyone looking for a tale of the Ozark hills.
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.