Wilson Rawls (1913-1984) was an American writer. He was born in Scraper, Oklahoma, in the Oklahoma Ozarks. There were no public schools in Scraper, so Rawls was home schooled on the family farm. He had little interest in reading until his mother bought him a copy of Call of the Wild by Jack London when he was ten. Rawls thus became a voracious reader and dreamed of writing a book. In 1928, his family moved to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and Rawls attended high school in Muskogee until he was forced to leave when the Great Depression came. Afterwards, Wilson moved from place to place working as an itinerant handyman and carpenter on the Alcan Highway in Alaska as well as in Canada and South America.In 1975 he moved to Cornell, Wisconsin where he died in Dec. of 1984.
Writing career
Rawls wrote great books between 1930 and 1960 and submitted them to publishers. However, they were all rejected due to problems with spelling, grammar and punctuation as a result of his limited schooling. He burnt all of his manuscripts before his marriage in 1958 to Sophia because of shame of the continued rejection. He did not want his new wife to find out. She did, however, eventually find out about the manuscripts, and she suggested that he rewrite one of the manuscripts so she could have a look at it. After three weeks of non-stop writing(he barely stopped to eat or sleep), he had rewritten Where that they work further on it, but instead she was delighted. As Sophia Rawls had had a formal education, she worked as the editor fixing the problems with the manuscript.The manuscript, then known as The Secret of the Red Fern was submitted to the Saturday Evening Post after a year of further work who initially rejected it. He then forwarded it to the Ladies' Home Journal who rejected it for publication but resubmitted the publication to the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine this time accepted it and publishing it as The Hounds of Youth. Doubleday saw the potential for a book which was published as Where the Red Fern Grows in 1961. At first, the book was targeted at adults and sales were slow. However, word of mouth amongst teachers and students who read the book started to spark sales and a Bantam paperback edition become very popular. A film was made based on the book and published in 1974. Rawls' second book, Summer of the Monkeys, was released by Doubleday in 1976. It won the 1979 William Allen White Award. After his first book became a hit, Rawls started touring schools and conventions of librarians and teachers telling people his life story and how Where the Red Fern Grows came about. Idaho Falls, where Rawls wrote the book in the late 1950s, built a statue of Billy Coleman, the main character, and his two hunting dogs, outside the public library in the late 1990s.
