Sounder

Sounder is a young adult novel by the American writer William H. Armstrong, published in 1969 by HarperCollins. It won the Newbery Medal.

The book follows an African-American family of sharecroppers in the rural South. The father is imprisoned for stealing food, the family has to manage without him, and the boy goes looking for work and for an education. Armstrong names the dog and nobody else: the mother, the father and the children are referred to only by their relationship or their role, so the story is told without personal names for its people. The setting is left deliberately vague; the author's notes refer to prisoners moved in mule-drawn wagons and to chain gangs, which puts the family in the American South without fixing a state.

Armstrong was a teacher for many years, and the novel grew out of a story he had heard about a dog who waited for a master who did not come back. It is a short book, and much of its force lies in what the family is never told and never says.