Book Review: John Quincy Wolf, Life in the Leatherwoods
Life in the Leatherwoods by John Quincy Wolf (originally published in 1974) is a very rare memoir about the lives, society and culture of the ‘plain folk’ of the Upper South during the late-19th Century, specifically the white small farmers of the Ozark Mountains in northern Arkansas. There are very few primary sources about this subject, such as diaries, letters or newspapers, especially from rural areas in this period, compared to the middle and upper classes, persons prominent in political and economic life or large slaveholders like Mary Chestnut. Those few records that may once have existed have largely been ...
