WOODY'S WORDS

The story of a boy, initially uninterested in reading, who went on to write a classic work of children’s fiction.

Born in Oklahoma in 1913, Woodrow Wilson Rawls (called Woody) was a country boy with a penchant for telling stories. Yet it wasn’t until his mother read him Jack London’s The Call of the Wild that he became a reader—and became inspired to write his own books. In and out of jail for theft during his young adulthood (food was often hard to come by during the Depression), Woody married, settled down, and, dismissing his writerly aspirations as impractical, burned his manuscripts. But when he shared his dreams with his wife, Sophie, he began to believe in himself, the result being his 1961 novel Where the Red Fern Grows. The overall theme of this biography isn’t the power of persistence, as one might think, but rather finding someone to believe in you and returning to your dreams. Reagan’s watercolors render both the gentle ripples of a slow creek and the violent conflagration that destroys Woody’s books with equal aplomb. Direct quotes from Rawls about his life, interspersed throughout, are all properly sourced. Rogers’ appended note acknowledges that Rawls would fictionalize parts of his own autobiography, a fact that places both author and illustrator in a position of telling the story of an unreliable narrator. What is reliable is the book’s dedication to the idea of writing from the heart.

A poignant tribute to the power of story.