Rawls grew up in the Ozark Mountain region of Oklahoma. He was mostly home-schooled by his mother, receiving little formal education and struggling with spelling and grammar, but after his mother gave him The Call of the Wild he decided to be a writer. When he was 16 the Great Depression hit and his family struck out for California. Their car broke down in New Mexico and his father found work there. In the 1930s and 1940s Rawls worked as a Carpenter and traveled to Mexico, Canada and Alaska. During this time he worked on multiple manuscripts, but ended up burning the manuscripts before his married to Sophie Ann Styczinski. After he confessed his desire to write his wife encouraged him, and he hand wrote the manuscript of
Where the Red Fern Grows in three weeks, polishing the grammar and spelling with his wife's help and submitting it, getting it serialized in the Saturday Evening Post as "the Hounds of Youth" in 3 parts in 1961. Doubleday bought the rights and published the book under the title Where the Red Fern Grows. Initial sales were slow, although now the book has sold over 7 million copies and is a classic in many schools.
Rawls published one other book in his lifetime,
Summer Of the Monkeys, in 1976. He went on to be a successful motivational speaker, talking to children in 2,000 schools, encouraging them to get an education and follow their dreams.
Wilson Rawls died of cancer December 16, 1984 at the age of 71.
