Published just days before America’s entry into World War II, Ozark Country is Otto Ernest Rayburn’s love letter to his adopted region. One of several chronicles of the Ozarks that garnered national attention during the Depression and war years, when many Americans craved stories about people and places seemingly untouched by the difficulties of the times, Rayburn’s colorful tour takes readers from the fictional village of Woodville into the backcountry of a region teeming with storytellers, ballad singers, superstitions, and home remedies.
Rayburn’s tales—fantastical, fun, and unapologetically romantic—portray a world that had already nearly disappeared by the time they were written. Yet Rayburn’s depiction of the Ozarks resonates with notions of the region that have persisted in the American consciousness ever since.
Born in Iowa and raised in Kansas, Otto Ernest Rayburn (1891–1960) was a teacher, writer, and magazine editor who devoted most of his life to the folklore and folkways of the Ozarks.
Brooks Blevins, the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, is a native of the Arkansas Ozarks and the author or editor of ten books, including Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State.
“A delightful literary frolic awaits the reader. Otto Rayburn declared that Ozarks ‘storytellers are born, not made.’ He wrote that his search for ‘true hillbillies’ took him from the ‘sublime to the ridiculous,’ but that only increased his love for the Ozarks. This admired folklorist entertained float fishermen, automobile tourists, and natives alike. Professor Brooks Blevins’s inspired introduction conveys perspective for Rayburn, while the volume is integrated into this classic American reprint series.”
—Lynn Morrow, editor of The Ozarks in Missouri History: Discoveries in an American Region
The Ozark books of the Depression era played a crucial role in establishing the simplistic and reductionist stereotypes, both positive and negative, of Ozarkers and the Ozarks. It is for that reason that the University of Arkansas Press has launched the Chronicles of the Ozarks, a reprint series that will make available some of the era’s Ozark books with introductions and editorial notes that place each book and its author against the backdrop of the era and its popular assumptions and myths of life in the Ozarks.
“Even more than eighty years since its publication, Ozark County is an engaging read. Each of the sixteen chapters begins with a short vignette of life in the apocryphal Woodville, an Ozarks community of happy, busy individuals living much as their Scotch-Irish and English forbears had for more than a century. … Throughout the book, Rayburn concedes that he is writing about a time that has all but passed, but one that is worth celebrating and remembering. Toward the end of the volume he says, ‘The Ozarks without the independent spirit of the hillman will be as drab as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet with Juliet left out’ …and that ‘The Ozarkian desire for freedom still lives in the hearts of thousands of the people…’ If you accept Rayburn’s thesis, this book is a marvelous look-back, and even if you don’t, it is a cogent explanation of where and why the mythology of the Ozarks is still front and center today.”
—Susan Croce Kelly, OzarksWatch, Spring/Summer 2022
Hidden Gems: Stereotypical but romantic life in the Ozarks revisited in Rayburn book (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)
