Visitors are sometimes surprised that Arkansawyers actually do read, and even, occasionally, write. Arkansas doesn't necessarily have an extensive or illustrious history in literature, but there's a fair number of books written by and about Arkansawyers, both historical and fictional.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet John Gould Fletcher's 1947 history of the state, Arkansas, remains interesting and valuable, though of course sixty years on much about it is out of date. As an introduction to the state and its people, it's as good a place to start as any, and it's a whole lot better written than most state histories you'll find.
Arkansas: A Narrative History is the standard history text these days. It's adequate and essentially accurate, if not particularly exciting.
In the realm of fiction, things get a bit more interesting. Donald Harington has made a brilliant literary career out of writing about the state, particularly the semi-fictional hamlet of Stay More in the remote Ozarks of Newton County, in novels like The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, The Cockroaches of Stay More, Lightning Bug, With, The Pitcher Shower, Butterfly Weed, and more. For the reader who wants to get acquainted with Arkansas, however, Harington's amazing Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns blends just a touch of fiction into a mostly factual account of brief rise and long fall of eleven different towns in Arkansas that have in common only the use of "City" in their names and the fact that they never really became anything like cities, and are mostly not even towns anymore. It deals with the whole state, not just the small corner of it that most of Harington's books cover. And it's also an incredibly moving love story.
Jack Butler's Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock is probably a more accurate portrayal of Little Rock, and Arkansas in general, in the 1980s than most Arkansawyers would want to admit. Utterly unconventional in its technique (the omniscient narrator is either the Holy Ghost, or the titular Miss Little Rock's deceased dog, or perhaps both), it's a good counterpoint to Harington in that its characters are mainly urban/suburban instead of rural, and it's entirely set in what was, at the time, the present.
Donald "Skip" Hays' novel The Dixie Association is also incredibly funny and serious at the same time, and while it's as much about baseball as it is about Arkansas, it's hard to imagine it being set anywhere but Little Rock.
While most people think of Arkansas as Southern, it's useful to remember that the western edge of the state butts up against Oklahoma, and that the southwestern quarter of Arkansas is almost as much a part of the West as the South. After all, Oklahoma remained exclusively Indian territory until 1889 and didn't become a state until 1907. The best book about this part of Arkansas during that time is probably also one of the best-known books about Arkansas: Charles Portis' True Grit, the story of a 14-year-old girl in Yell County, Arkansas in 1885 who hires a U.S. Marshall to help her obtain justice for the murder of her father by a man now hiding out in the Choctaw Nation. The movie, with John Wayne as Marshall Rooster Cogburn, made this easily the most famous of Portis' novels (and got Wayne his only Oscar), though the others (Norwood, Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos) are equally good.
