For the Central Arkansas Library System and Little Rock Public Radio, I’m Mark Christ with an Encyclopedia of Arkansas Minute.
A once popular Arkansas novelist is scarcely remembered today. Opie Read was born in Tennessee in 1852 and moved to Carlisle twenty-four years later. After creating an unsuccessful newspaper there, he moved to Little Rock and became the Arkansas Democrat’s city editor, a position he held until writing an unflattering piece on his publisher.
After gaining a national reputation for covering a yellow fever epidemic for a New York paper, he became city editor of the Arkansas Gazette before co-founding the humorous Arkansaw Traveler, which he ran for eleven years. In 1888 Read wrote the first of many books and short stories, often set in Arkansas and focusing on various aspects of Southern life. Notably, many of his pieces gave voices to African American characters.
Read lectured widely and was a noted golfer, fisherman and gambler. When he died in 1893 the New York Times wrote “His name is inseparable from Arkansas,” but a critic held that “he wrote something that everybody read but nobody remembers.”
To learn more, visit Encyclopedia of Arkansas.net.
