Fiction

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Entry Category: Fiction

Pullers

Tom Graves’s 1998 novel Pullers features rare subject matter: the sport of arm wrestling (participants refer to themselves as “pullers”). The Southern Gothic–style novel opens with an arm-wrestling contest at Bad Bill’s Hawg Trawf in Pine Bluff (Jefferson County). The novel then shifts to Memphis, Tennessee, where most of the story takes place. But characters spend time on both sides of the Mississippi River, enough that Pullers should be regarded both for its Arkansas and Tennessee pedigrees. The winner of the Pine Bluff contest, Scud Matthews, makes his grand entrance at the event with a much smaller man on a leash, both wearing T-shirts that read: “We’re Queer Dear.” With his use of juxtaposition and stereotypes, Graves is primarily going …

Read, Opie

Opie Read was a newspaperman, author, and lecturer. He cofounded the comic newspaper the Arkansaw Traveler and wrote several successful novels. Arkansas provided much of his education as he worked for three Little Rock (Pulaski County) newspapers: the Arkansas Gazette, the Arkansas Evening Democrat, and the Evening Ledger. His work as city editor and his associations with the state’s antebellum elite provided him with decades of literary material. Opie Read was born on December 22, 1852, in Nashville, Tennessee, the youngest of eleven children. (His middle name is recorded various sources as either Pope or Percival, with the consensus being that it was like the latter.) His parents were Guilford and Elizabeth Wallace Read. Read’s early life was spent in …

Richards, Dusty

aka: Ronald Lee Richards
Dusty Richards was an author of numerous Western novels and a noted mentor each year to hundreds of beginning writers. Beginning in 2000, he was a patron contributor of the Arkansas Writers’ Conference. In 2005, he received the Cowboy Culture Award for the many hours he has volunteered in helping aspiring authors. Ronald Lee “Dusty” Richards was born on November 11, 1937, in Chicago, Illinois, to John C. Richards and Jean E. Hogenbirk Richards. His father was a stationary power plant engineer, and his mother was a homemaker. He had one brother and one sister. At thirteen, he moved with his family to Mesa, Arizona. A year later, they moved to Phoenix, Arizona. He graduated from North Phoenix High School …

Risley, Eleanor de la Vergne Doss

When the Arkansas State Library sponsored an event for supporters in 1939, librarian Vera Snook wrote Eleanor Risley, hoping to entice her to attend. Other honored guests were John Gould Fletcher, Charles J. Finger, and Charles Morrow Wilson. Risley’s inclusion on the list is an indication of the importance attached to her reputation as a nationally recognized Arkansas writer. Risley’s two novels, The Road to Wildcat: A Tale of Southern Mountaineering (1930) and An Abandoned Orchard (1932), had been published by Little, Brown and Company and were critically well received. Between 1928 and 1931, The Atlantic Monthly magazine published a series of Risley short stories about rural southern mountain life. The May 1931 Atlantic Monthly piece “Drought,” which was set …

Rivers, Diana

Diana Rivers is an author, artist, and promoter of women’s communities and art venues. Rivers has published numerous short stories and eight novels in the genre of speculative fiction, seven of which compose the Hadra series. Rivers lives in Madison County. Diana Rivers was born Diana Duer Smith on October 17, 1931, in New York City and grew up in suburban New Jersey near Morristown. Her parents, Schuyler Smith and Elizabeth Larocque, separated before she was three years old. Her mother wrote poems and stories, publishing a book of verse, Satan’s Shadow, in 1930. Rivers’s great-aunt Caroline King Duer was a poet and an editor for Vogue magazine, and her other great-aunt, Alice Duer Miller, wrote poems, stories, novels, plays, …

Rumor Has It [Book Series]

“Rumor Has It…” is a three-book romance novel series written by Penny Richards and published in 2000–2001 by Silhouette Books, an imprint of Harlequin Books. The three books are set in the fictional town of Lewiston, Arkansas, and center upon the themes of high school romance rekindled later in life and of hidden paternity coming to light. The intended location of Lewiston is unclear. A map included in the first book, Sophie’s Scandal, places Lewiston in approximately the location of Mountain View (Stone County), and the cover of this first book depicts rolling hills, but a similar map in the next two books, Lara’s Lover and Judging Justine, has Lewiston corresponding a little more closely to Brookland (Craighead County) in …

Salassi, Otto

Otto Russell Salassi was a librarian and writer best known for the young-adult novel Jimmy D., Sidewinder, and Me (1987). Salassi attended and worked at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) and lived in Fayetteville from 1974 until his death. Otto Salassi was born on October 2, 1939, in Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Walter Salassi and Ruby Lee Salassi. He served in the U.S. Air Force and worked as a mathematician at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California before attending Memphis State University, where he was awarded a BS in English and philosophy in 1967. He earned an MLS from Vanderbilt University in 1968 and worked as a librarian first at Bemidji State College in Minnesota (where he …

Scott, Melissa Elaine

A scholar who followed her father, a prominent lawyer, from Little Rock Central High School to the academic citadels of the east, Melissa Scott turned to writing fiction in the 1980s and became one of the most honored and prolific authors of English-language science fiction. Over nearly forty years, she has published eighteen original novels, several short stories, and numerous tie-in novels for the science-fiction network-television series Star Trek and Stargate: Atlantis. Her fiction has been noted for the frequency of lesbian and gay characters, who were often the protagonists. In the 1980s, even among book lovers, there was little knowledge or acceptance of the biological and social diversity of human life in the area of gender and sexuality. The …

Shakespeare Series

aka: Lily Bard Series
The Shakespeare series consists of five novels in the “cozy” crime genre by Charlaine Harris, who lived in Arkansas for many years. Shakespeare and Bartley, the fictional Arkansas towns where the novels are set, resemble several small communities in the state, and Little Rock (Pulaski County) and Memphis, Tennessee, are both referred to as conveniently nearby. Like other books in this genre, these novels do not focus on police procedure or the reasoning of a genius detective. Instead, a lay person, generally a woman, investigates and solves a crime, sometimes with the help of a police officer or other trained investigator. In order of publication, Harris’s Shakespeare novels are Shakespeare’s Landlord (1996), Shakespeare’s Champion (1997), Shakespeare’s Christmas (1998), Shakespeare’s Trollop …

Shaver, Richard Sharpe

Richard Sharpe Shaver was an American writer and “outsider” artist best known for his controversial stories known collectively as “the Shaver Mystery,” which were presented as nonfiction in science fiction magazines, most notably Amazing Stories. These stories, in which Shaver claimed to have discovered an ancient, sinister civilization in underground caves, led to Shaver Mystery Clubs and influenced many artists and writers, including Harlan Ellison and Phillip K. Dick. Shaver died in the Arkansas town of Summit (Marion County), where he had moved in the mid-1960s. Richard Shaver was born on October 7, 1907, in Virginia, but his family moved to Berwick, Pennsylvania, sometime before 1910. Little is reliably known about Shaver’s early life. According to Shaver, in 1932, while …

Simon, Charlie May

Charlie May Simon is among the state’s most prolific major authors. Known primarily for her children’s literature, with just under thirty books and with numerous short stories to her credit, Simon had a long career writing for adults as well. Additionally, she is known as the wife of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Gould Fletcher. Her work in the field of children’s literature has been honored in Arkansas since 1971 by the annual presentation of the Charlie May Simon Book Award. Simon was born Charlie May Hogue on August 17, 1897, not far from Monticello (Drew County), to Charles Wayman Hogue and Mary Gill Hogue. She was named after both her parents, according to Southern tradition. Her father, a tenant farmer …

Snake Eyes: Murder in a Southern Town

Snake Eyes: Murder in a Southern Town is a true crime nonfiction book written by Bitty Martin of Hot Springs (Garland County) and published by Prometheus Books in 2022. The book received much acclaim, garnering positive reviews, brisk sales, and requests from across the nation for the Arkansas-based author to appear on true crime media programming. Over the six years she spent writing the book and interviewing more than fifty sources, Martin uncovered underlying secrets about the death of a teenage girl in what was originally called an accident but later revealed to be a murder. The book’s title is evocative not only of the scene of the crime but also the era in Hot Springs history when it was …

Southern Strategy [Novel]

In his long career as a journalist, Bob Lancaster wrote a single novel, Southern Strategy, based upon and perhaps inspired by his experiences as a young reporter during the crisis that followed the showdown between Governor Orval E. Faubus and the federal courts over school desegregation at Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1957. Southern Strategy, published in 1981 by Seaview Books of New York, followed the moral journey of its picaresque main character, Amos Shellnut, a contented sawmill worker whose life in a small town outside Little Rock is disrupted by the sudden flight of his sweetheart Norma to Hollywood to seek her destiny and also by discombobulations in his town caused by Faubus’s racial demagoguery. In the novel, Shellnut, …

Stay More [Book Series]

“Stay more,” according to Arkansas novelist Donald Harington, was the polite entreaty that settlers of the Ozarks would use at the end of a visit to keep their guests from leaving. Visitors who knew their mountain manners would never simply decline the invitation, but instead respond with an equally polite counter-invitation to their hosts to come home with them. The leave-taking formality could go on and on, with host and guest affirming over and over their affection for the other’s company and their reluctance to give it up. “Stay More” was also the name of the fictional Ozarks town that Harington created and returned to many times in thirteen of the fifteen novels he published during his lifetime. The origins …

Stewart, Trenton Lee

Trenton Lee Stewart is a contemporary novelist and short-story writer. He is well known as the author of The Mysterious Benedict Society series of best-selling young adult novels. Described by Kirkus Reviews as “entertainingly quirky” and “hung about with cantrips to catch clever readers,” Stewart’s writing incorporates a cerebral playfulness, utilizing wordplay and mental puzzles that the reader is invited to solve along with the characters. The series has garnered nationwide popularity among students and teachers alike. Additionally, his stories have been published in a number of literary magazines, including the Georgia Review, Shenandoah, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and the New England Review. The 2004 Best American Short Stories volume, published by Houghton Mifflin and guest edited by Lorrie Moore, …

Stockley, Griffin Jasper

Griffin Jasper Stockley Jr. was an author, historian, and attorney known for his lifelong commitment to the cause of civil rights. Although Stockley was honored over the years for his legal achievements, his books garnered him the widest recognition. His five Gideon Page novels became popular in the 1990s. Noteworthy in their own right, his legal mysteries are also an outward expression of Stockley’s own personal and political beliefs. In 2001, he published a finely researched historical account of the Elaine Massacre, titled Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919, and he followed that up with a biography of Daisy Bates, a history of the Negro Boys Industrial School Fire of 1959, and other works of history. …

Street, James Howell

James Howell Street was a newspaperman and novelist who worked at the Arkansas Gazette in the 1920s and later wrote essays celebrating the state and the newspaper. James Street was born on October 15, 1903, in Lumberton, Mississippi, to John Camillus Street and William Thompson Scott Street (her actual name). Although his family was Catholic, he converted and became a Baptist minister after marrying Lucy Nash O’Briant, the daughter of a Baptist preacher, in 1923. After three children were born, he gave up preaching and became a newspaper reporter, first at the Pensacola Journal in Florida and then in 1926 at the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock (Pulaski County). He was twenty-three when he went to work for the Gazette …

Stuart, Mary Routh McEnery

aka: Ruth McEnery Stuart
Mary Routh McEnery Stuart, working under the name Ruth McEnery Stuart, wrote a body of fiction and poetry based on the experiences she had in Arkansas, modeling characters, dialect, and even a fictional town on her interactions within the state. She was, both financially and critically, one of the most successful fiction writers of her time, and in recent years has been studied by feminist and social literary critics. Routh McEnery was born on February 19, 1852, (according to the date provided on her marriage license; though she may have been born as early as 1849). Her parents were Mary Routh Stirling and James McEnery, who was at that time the mayor of Marksville, Louisiana, where McEnery was born. In …

Sugar Lacey Series

aka: Sugar [Book]
aka: This Bitter Earth [Book]
Sugar Lacey, a fictional character created by novelist Bernice L. McFadden, is the protagonist in Sugar and its sequel This Bitter Earth. The two novels center on a brutal murder of a young girl in 1940s Arkansas and the personal redemption of Sugar, an emotionally broken prostitute with a turbulent past. The series is a story of acceptance with a backdrop of the segregated South. McFadden’s debut novel, Sugar (Dutton, 2000), introduced readers to the title character, Sugar Lacey. Most of the novel’s action takes place in 1955, but the story begins in 1940 with the brutal rape, murder, and mutilation of Jude, the young African-American daughter of Pearl Taylor in the small, mainly black fictional town of Bigelow. In …

Summer of My German Soldier

Bette Greene’s Summer of My German Soldier is a novel and a television movie set in eastern Arkansas during World War II. Both portray the Arkansas location, era, and characters realistically. Since the novel’s publication in 1973, it has remained a young-adult best-seller and is considered a classic of young-adult literature. In 1973, it was an American Library Association Notable Book, a National Book Award finalist, and one of The New York Times’s Outstanding Books of the Year; it also won the Golden Kite award. In 1979, the movie earned Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama and Outstanding Writing. Esther Rolle won the Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy for her portrayal of Ruth. Rolle praised Greene for her skillful, true-to-life characterization of …

Thanet, Octave

aka: Alice French
Alice French was a leading writer of local color stories and journalistic essays under the pseudonym Octave Thanet. Some of her best work is based on the years she spent at her winter home in Clover Bend (Lawrence County) in the Black River swamp country. French also published stories and essays in such national periodicals as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Scribner’s Magazine, and Century Magazine. She prided herself on the accurate depiction not only of the physical setting of her stories but also of the customs and dialect of the characters in them. Alice French was born on March 19, 1850, in Andover, Massachusetts, to George Henry French and Frances Morton. The French family also included sons George, Morton, Nathaniel, and …

Thibault, David

David Thibault was an agricultural agent and writer whose short stories appeared in popular national magazines. His early death cut short his career before he could accumulate a large body of significant work. Some of his best fiction draws characters, settings, and themes from plantation life in Arkansas in the early twentieth century. David Thibault was born on May 23, 1892, at Walnut Grove plantation east of Little Rock (Pulaski County). His parents were James Keatts Thibault, a farmer, and Corinne Laurie Gibson Thibault. He was the youngest of nine chlidren and was educated in the public schools of Little Rock. In 1915, Thibault married Irene Graeme Stockton, a high school English teacher. In 1917, they had a son, David …

This Scorched Earth

This Scorched Earth is a 2018 work of historical fiction by William Gear set in the Arkansas Ozarks during the Civil War. While the Civil War has been fertile ground for historical fiction, novelists have rarely ventured west of the Mississippi River to the often-ignored Trans-Mississippi Theater. This Scorched Earth is an exception. Gear avoids the stereotypical image of Arkansas Ozarkers as benighted hillbillies. The story centers around the experiences of the Hancock family—mother, father, three sons, and one daughter—who live in the highlands of northwestern Arkansas not far from Elkhorn Tavern. The eldest son is a doctor, a recent graduate of medical school in Boston, Massachusetts. The middle son spent time as a student in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he …

Tom Sawyer, Detective

Tom Sawyer, Detective, a novella written by Mark Twain and published in 1896, was a parody of mystery stories, especially the Sherlock Holmes tales of Arthur Conan Doyle, which began to appear in 1887. Set in Arkansas, the novel was adapted into a movie in 1938. In the mid-1890s, Mark Twain, near bankruptcy after unwise investments, returned to his popular characters Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to revive his fortunes. He wrote Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), a parody of the travel adventures of Jules Verne, and began a novel to be titled Tom Sawyer among the Indians, which was never completed. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) had an unusual origin. While visiting Europe in late 1894, Twain had been told the …

Tomkievicz, Shirley Jean Abbott

aka: Shirley Abbott
Shirley Jean Abbott Tomkievicz, a magazine editor and writer, achieved her greatest fame for her three volumes of memoirs, which detail the story of her family history and her own coming of age in Hot Springs (Garland County): Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South (1983), The Bookmaker’s Daughter: A Memory Unbound (1991), and Love’s Apprentice: The Education of a Modern Woman (1998), all written under the name Shirley Abbott. Critics  lauded her books as well-written examinations, not only of her own life, but of the South in an age of transition. Even after becoming a resident of New York, Abbott continues to write about Arkansas for a wide audience in magazines and newspapers. She once commented, “I learned to respect and …

Trieschmann, John Werner, IV

John Werner Trieschmann IV is a playwright and professor living in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Trieschmann’s many plays have been staged by Moving Arts in Los Angeles, California; Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York; the New Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts; Red Octopus Productions in Little Rock; and other companies, as well as by countless middle schools and high schools in the United States and abroad. First-prize winner of the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans New Play Competition, Trieschmann was also the first playwright to have been honored with the prestigious Porter Prize in Arkansas (1994). Werner Trieschmann was born on September 9, 1964, in Hot Springs (Garland County), the oldest of four boys. His father, John Trieschmann, was a …

True Grit

“Here is what happened.” With those simple words, Mattie Ross of Dardanelle (Yell County) begins her reminiscence of the time she avenged her father’s murder with the help of a one-eyed deputy marshal and a dandy Texas Ranger. Set in western Arkansas and the Indian Territory of the 1870s, the novel True Grit, written by Arkansan Charles Portis, mixes this unlikely trio of personalities in a bestselling Western adventure. Published in 1968, True Grit was adapted into a movie and released the following year. The movie garnered veteran actor John Wayne the first and only Oscar of his career for his portrayal of Deputy Marshal Rooster Cogburn. In 2010, a second film adaptation of the novel, written and directed by …

Wedding Date in Hot Springs, Arkansas, A [Book]

A Wedding Date in Hot Springs, Arkansas is a 2012 romance novel by Arkansas writer Annalisa Daughety, published by Barbour Publishing, an outlet for Christian fiction and devotionals. The plot involves a young single woman finding unexpected love as she tries to secure a date for her sister’s wedding in Hot Springs (Garland County). Violet Matthews, a graduate of Harding University in Searcy (White County) and the University of Arkansas School of Law in Fayetteville (Washington County), works at the family law firm, now led by her father Sampson Matthews, in Little Rock (Pulaski County). She is expecting to be made a partner in the firm, but that honor goes to Landry Baxter, the love interest of her sister, Amber. …

Whitehead, James Tillotson (Jim)

James Tillotson Whitehead was a Mississippi-reared athlete who received a classical education at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee to prepare himself for a career writing poetry and fiction and teaching in Arkansas. He won some literary acclaim for his single completed work of fiction, the novel Joiner, and published four books of poetry. With his Vanderbilt pal William Harrison, he started the creative-writing program at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County). Jim Whitehead was born on March 15, 1936, in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Dick Bruun Whitehead and Ruth Ann Tillotson Whitehead. The family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, at the end of World War II, and Whitehead attended school there. His large size, strength, and agility …

Wild Child

Wild Child is a 2013 romantic novel written by author Molly O’Keefe and published by Bantam Books. It was the first book in the Boys of Bishop series to be set in the fictional town of Bishop, Arkansas. The novel opens with Jackson Davies, the relatively young mayor of Bishop, watching a television interview with Dean Jennings, CEO of Maybream Crackers, who plans to relocate a factory from South America back to the United States. To decide on the right place for it, Jennings will be hosting a televised competition among small towns with unused industrial facilities. Jackson hopes that winning the factory could revitalize his dying town with its shuttered okra-processing facility. But Jackson’s secret, personal goal is to …