March 19, 1850

Writer Alice French was born in Andover, Massachusetts. Writing under the pseudonym Octave Thanet, she was a leading writer of local color stories. Some of her best work is based on the years she spent at her winter home in Clover Bend (Lawrence County). The best of her Arkansas fiction demonstrates her considerable skills: she could render the speech of common people; she had an eye for the colorful, arresting details of the southern landscape; and she presented a view of Arkansas that was popular with the American people. One of her reviewers wrote, “There is but one Arkansas, and Octave Thanet is its prophet.”