Where the Red Fern Grows

Wilson Rawls was born in 1913 in the Ozark Mountains in the Oklahoma/Arkansas region of the United States, where Rawls time spent roaming the hills with his dogs. His level of formal education left him unsure of his formal writing ability, and he disposed of his manuscripts. However, his wife encouraged him to start again, leading to the publication of Where the Red Fern Grows in 1961 and The Summer of the Monkeys 15 years later. Where the Red Fern Grows originally appeared as a three-part work of serialized fiction called The Hounds of Youth in The Saturday Evening Post.

Plot Summary

As the novel opens, Billy Colman comes upon a stray coonhound fighting with a pack of dogs. He rescues the stray and takes it home, setting it free as soon as it is well enough to return home. This situation evokes memories of Billy’s youth in the Ozarks of Oklahoma in the early 1930s, and the rest of the story is from his childhood perspective.

Young Billy wants a pair of coonhounds, but they are not affordable for his family. He comes across an advertisement for a kennel in Kentucky that’s selling coonhounds for $25.