“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 Simon recounts her homesteading experiment in Depression-era Arkansas. Years before she established herself as a regional author of national renown, she chose a spot near Cove Creek, now part of Ouachita National Forest, to forge a home from rugged land, meeting both a backbreaking series of challenges and a vivid cast of characters in the process.
Nationally popular upon its release in 1945, Simon’s lyrical memoir was praised from the outset for its warmth and charm. At once an ethnographic narrative of a hill 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 a new generation of readers.
Charlie May Simon was born in a tenant-farmer cabin near Monticello, Arkansas, in 1897. Best known for her children’s literature, she also wrote biographies for young adult readers as well as two memoirs and a novel for adults. The daughter of the author Charles Wayman Hogue, Simon spent much of her life in the company of other creatives, including her third husband, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet John Gould Fletcher. Honored with many awards for her literary achievements, she traveled extensively in researching the lives of humanitarians like Andrew Carnegie, Albert Schweitzer, Toyohiko Kagawa, Dag Hammarskjöld, Martin Buber, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. After her homesteading years, Simon 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.
“In Straw in the Sun, Charlie May Simon never indulges in the easy dichotomies that poison our own politics and culture, for she finds neighborliness, knowledge, and beauty wherever she turns in rural Perry County, Arkansas. She indelibly captures the lives of hill folks while also underlining the truth that all of us are simply passing through this world, standing between the generations before us and the generations to come.”
—Guy Lancaster, author of American Atrocity: The Types of Violence in Lynching and editor of the online CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas
