Opie Percival Read

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1852, Opie Read became known as an American journalist, humorist, novelist, and lecturer. Reliable sources agree that he worked for a string of Southern newspapers before building a wider reputation as a writer, and that Arkansas played an important role in his early career.

He is especially remembered for cofounding the comic paper The Arkansaw Traveler in Little Rock in 1882. Reference works also note that he went on to write many books and became popular for fiction and sketches drawn from life in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas, often using regional speech, satire, and homespun humor.

Read later spent much of his professional life in Chicago, where he continued writing and lecturing. He died there in 1939, leaving behind a large body of work that connects journalism, storytelling, and the richly observed local color writing of his era.