Fun Facts Friday: W.Wilson Rawls

W.Wilson Rawls (24 September, 1913 – 16 December, 1984) was an American author known for the children’s book Where the Red Fern Grows.

Books by W. Wilson Rawls*

Fun Facts about W. Wilson Rawls:

1. Woodrow Wilson Rawls was born in Scraper, Cherokee County, Oklahoma, to Minzy O. and Winnie Hatfield Rawls.
2. The author grew up on the family farm, which was allotted from his mother’s Cherokee heritage.
3. The farm and rural experience in the eastern Oklahoma hills made excellent material for Mr. Rawls fictional stories.
4. Mrs. Rawls taught her son to read. He was especially influenced by the stories of Jack London which made him want to become a writer.
5. During the Great Depression the Rawls family left Oklahoma to California. Their car broke down near Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mr. Rawls found a job in a toothpaste factory there.
6. After the Great Depression, Mr. Rawls hoboed around the United States, South America, Canada, and Alaska collecting stories and making his living as a carpenter and laborer.
7. The manuscripts he wrote during that time were full with spelling and grammatical errors, with no punctuation. He kept them hidden in the trunk.
8. Where the Red Fern Grows, telling of a boy who finds and trains two hunting dogs, was made into two movies, a 1974 and a 2003 version.
9. The author’s second novel, The Summer of Monkeys, won the William Allen White Children’s Book Award and the Oklahoma Library Association’s Sequoyah Children’s Book Award in 1979.
10. W. Wilson Rawls became a very popular speaker and spent a lot of his own time visiting schools to encourage students to read and writer.

Books by W. Wilson Rawls*

Zohar — Man of la Book
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account