Wilson Rawls

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Wilson Rawls (1913-1984) was an American writer best known for his books Where the Red Fern Grows and Summer of the Monkeys.

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 Elkview, West Virginia, 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 December 1984.