Life in the Leatherwoods: John Quincy Wolf

LIFE IN THE LEATHERWOODS by John Quincy Wolf - edited, with an afterword, by John Quincy Wolf, Jr., introduction and notes by F. Jack Hurley and Illustrations by Jim Barnett - Spelling bees, fist fights on horseback, quail hunts by torchlight, the cunning ways of guinea hens, stealing cream from the springhouse - these incidents and many more are recounted in this memoir of growing up in the Ozark foothills in the two decades following the Civil War. The author also describes his early manhood as a steamboat clerk on the upper White River at the end of the century. Informative as well as entertaining. he describes some of the economic changes brought to this isolated area, first by the steamboat and later by the railroad. These sharply focused glimpses into nineteenth-century farm life picture sad as well as happy times, hard as well as flush times, and so form an important document of a vanished way of life. Full of source material for the social historian or student of regional literature, these sketches provide many insights into early rural attitudes. There is humor on several levels-the offhand humor of the frontier, the general popularity of practical jokers who brightened up the dull routine of country life. But most of all, it abounds with the classic rural humor which is gently aimed at self--and is perhaps the most basic theme of early American humor.