While living in a house on 11th Street here in Idaho Falls, Wilson Rawls wrote – again – the much-loved children's book, "Where the Red Fern Grows." In 1998, a statue (waypoint 43° 29.514 N, 112° 02.527 W) of the book's main character Billy and his two dogs was placed on the north lawn of the Idaho Falls Public Library to commemorate Rawls' contribution.
Born in 1913, W. Wilson Rawls spent his early childhood on a farm in Oklahoma. There were no schools, so his mother taught her children by reading from books like "The Little Red Hen" and "Little Red Riding Hood" – books that didn't interest the young boy very much. But when she read aloud Jack London's "Call of the Wild," it caught his attention, waking within him a desire to write a book about a boy and his dog that would influence others the way London's book had influenced him.
When his family moved, Rawls was able to attend school for a few years, until the Great Depression led him to drop out of school at the eighth grade. He traveled the country working odd carpentry and handyman jobs, and writing on whatever scraps of paper he could find. But without a formal education, his poor spelling and grammar kept his writing from ever being published.
Rawls lived in Idaho Falls from 1958 until 1975. In 1958, he and Sophie Styczinski decided to marry. Just a few weeks before the wedding, Rawls decided to give up his dream of being a writer. He gathered together all his manuscripts and burned them.
But still, Rawls longed to write. Within a few months of their marriage, he confided his dream to his new wife. Sophie encouraged him to write down one of those stories again, and he wrote "Where the Red Fern Grows." Sophie polished the book's spelling and grammar, and they submitted it to the Saturday Evening Post, where it was first published in serial form, just as "Lassie Come Home" had been serialized there 20 years earlier. Rawls went on to write another children's book, "Summer of the Monkeys." In 1975, Rawls and Sophie moved from Idaho Falls to Wisconsin, where he died in 1984.
Here's a list of the books use to start this cache. Almost all are new paperbacks ... some I picked up form the book orders the kids brought home from school and a few freebies that came my way. Hopefully, folks passing through will have had the chance to learn a little about an author from right here in Idaho and pick up something new to read at night while on vacation :)
Classics:
"The Call of the Wild" by Jack London
"The Little Prince" by Antoine de Saint Exupery
Children's:
"Polar Bears Past Bedtime" (Magic Tree House #12) by Mary Pope Osborne
"Horrible Harry and the Purple People" by Suzy Kline
Western novels:
"Wyatt Earp" by Matt Braun
"Hickok & Cody" by Matt Braun
"A Cold Hard Trail" by Robert J. Conley
Have fun!