Central Arkansas Library System’s Butler Center for Arkansas Studies will award the Booker Worthen Literary Prize to John Kirk for Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912–1956. The Booker Worthen Literary Prize is awarded each year to the best work, fiction or non-fiction, by an author living in Arkansas.
Why did Winthrop Rockefeller, scion of one of the most powerful families in American history, leave New York for an Arkansas mountaintop in the 1950s? In this richly detailed biography of the former Arkansas governor, John A. Kirk delves into the historical record to fully unravel that mystery for the first time. Kirk pursues clues threaded throughout Rockefeller’s life, tracing his family background, childhood, and education; his rise in the oil industry from roustabout to junior executive; his military service in the Pacific during World War II, including his involvement in the battles of Guam, Leyte, and Okinawa; his postwar work in race relations, health, education, and philanthropy; his marriage to and divorce from Barbara “Bobo” Sears; and the birth of his only child, future Arkansas lieutenant governor Win Paul Rockefeller. This careful examination of Winthrop Rockefeller’s first forty-four years casts a powerful new light on his relationship with his adopted state, where his legacy continues to be felt more than half a century after his governorship.
Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912–1956 also won the 2024 J.G. Ragsdale Book Award, given by the Arkansas Historical Association
John A. Kirk is the George W. Donaghey Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the author or editor of ten books, including Beyond Little Rock: The Origins and Legacies of the Central High Crisis and Race and Ethnicity in Arkansas: New Perspectives.
Previous winners of the Booker Worthen Literary Prize from the University of Arkansas Press are Arkansas, 1800–1860: Remote and Restless by S. Charles Bolton, The Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673–1804 by Morris Arnold, Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919 by Grif Stockley, Promises Kept by Sidney McMath, Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas from Slavery to the Present by Grif Stockley, Fiat Flux: The Writings of Wilson R. Bachelor, Nineteenth-Century Country Doctor and Philosopher by William Lindsey, Anti-Catholicism in Arkansas: How Politicians, the Press, the Klan, and Religious Leaders Imagined an Enemy by Kenneth Barnes, Dardanelle and the Bottoms: Environment, Agriculture, and Economy in an Arkansas River Community, 1819–1970 by Mildred Diane Gleason, Just and Righteous Causes: Rabbi Ira Sanders and the Fight for Racial and Social Justice in Arkansas, 1926–1963 by James Moses, Fugitivism: Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820–1860 by S. Charles Bolton, Das Arkansas Echo: A Year in the Life of Germans in the Nineteenth-Century South by Kathleen Condray, The Ku Klux Klan in 1920s Arkansas: How Protestant White Nationalism Came to Rule a State by Kenneth Barnes, and Shared Secrets: The Queer World of Newbery Medalist Charles J. Finger by Elizabeth Findley Shores.