The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of a new edition of Charlie May Simon’s classic memoir Straw in the Sun, with a new introduction from Simon scholar Aleshia O’Neal.
“Last spring I went to Rocky Crossing again. New green grass was sprouting on the high ridge of the road that led there, and now and then there grew a persimmon shoot, or a small hickory, where a nut had fallen and opened deep in the untrampled earth. But the ruts made long ago by passing wagons were still there, guiding the wheels of our car through the dense forest, around the boulders and between the tall trees. I was like a ghost returning to a place once loved.”
These opening lines of Charlie May Simon’s Straw in the Sun invite readers on a personal journey of remembrance as she recounts her homesteading experiment in Depression-era Arkansas. Years before she established herself as a regional author of national renown, she and her then husband, artist Howard Simon, chose a spot near Cove Creek in the present-day Ouachita National Forest to forge a home from a rugged land, meeting both a backbreaking series of adversities and vivid cast of characters in the process.
Nationally popular and widely reviewed upon its release in 1945, her lyrical story and beautiful prose were praised for a warmth, charm, and simplicity that signaled her future as one of Arkansas’s most important female authors. At once an ethnographic narrative of a hill country community and an accessible portrait of Ozarks memories at their most idyllic, Straw in the Sun, offered here with a robust introduction from Simon scholar Aleshia O’Neal, is a classic ready for rediscovery by new generation of readers.
Charlie May Hogue, whose professional writing surname was Simon, was born in a tenant farmer cabin near Monticello, AR in 1897. Her father was Charles Wayman Hogue, author of the pioneer memoir Back Yonder. Simon authored 29 books in a writing career that spanned forty years: fiction for children, biographies of humanitarians for young adult readers, plus two memoirs and a fictional novel for her adult readers. Although her pen name remained Simon, Charlie May married poet and Little Rock resident John Gould Fletcher after her experience of homesteading in the 1930s in Perry County, Arkansas. Honored with many awards for her literary achievements, she traveled abroad in the decade after the death of her husband, researching the lives of humanitarians like Andrew Carnegie, Albert Schweitzer, Toyohiko Kagaw, Dag Hammarkskjold, Martin Buber, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Although her childhood, education, college years, social activism and marriage in her twenties to Walter Lowenstein occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, after her homesteading years she remained a lifetime resident of Little Rock, Arkansas until her death in 1977.
Aleshia O’Neal is an assistant professor of English at College of the Ozarks in Hollister, Missouri.
Straw in the Sun: A Memoir will be published in January 2025.