Winthrop Rockefeller: From New Yorker to Arkansawyer, 1912–1956 by John A. Kirk, has been reviewed in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.
“Kirk has produced a … sympathetic, deeply researched, and balanced account of Winthrop Rockefeller’s early life. … Kirk’s book does much to demolish the conventional view of Winthrop Rockefeller as a nonentity whose unhappy marriage and stormy divorce prompted him to leave New York and become a cattle rancher in Arkansas. What emerges instead is a portrait of an upper-class person who was something of a misfit in the world from which he came and found another one where he fit better as a result of the larger changes in American life associated with the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.”
—David Stebenne, Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Spring 2022
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.
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.