From the expeditions of de Soto in the sixteenth century to the celebrated work of such contemporary writers as Maya Angelou, Ellen Gilchrist, and Miller Williams, Arkansas has enjoyed a rich history of letters. These voices have been, and still are, as various as the state’s geography. Available in two volumes, this anthology of writers from various genres—travel writing, biography, history, poetry, fiction—reflects the state’s unity as well as its sometimes extreme cultural, political, and topographical diversity.
The writers represented here are primarily Arkansans writing about Arkansas. Writers who are not natives or residents, but who, nevertheless, have written about the state are included as well, as are those who have strong connections to the state but whose work does not.
Volume 2 include such poets and prose writers as C. Vann Woodward, C. D. Wright, Leon Stokesbury, Barry Hannah, J. William Fulbright, and John Clellon Holmes. It is an indication of the talent that has proliferated in the last twenty-five years. The two volumes gather, in a single collection, the best work from Arkansas’s rich literary history, celebrating the variety of its voices and the national treasure those voices have become.
