Woodrow Wilson Rawls was born on September 24, 1913, in the Ozark country of Scraper, Oklahoma. His mother home-schooled her children, and after Rawls read Jack London's canine-centered tale Call of the Wild, he decided to become a writer. He wrote his first stories in the dirt beside country roads or the sands along rivers.
When you’re the Great Depression hit the Unites States in 1929, and Rawls left home to find work. His family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1935, and he came home each fall to work and hunt. He wrote stories while he traveled, but his lack of formal education hampered his grammar, and he could not sell anything. In 1958, he gave up on his dream and burned all...