Where the Red Fern Grows

Where the Red Fern Grows is a 1961 children's novel by Wilson Rawls about a boy who buys and trains two Redbone Coonhounds for hunting. It is autobiographical fiction, drawing on the author's own childhood in the Ozarks.

The book is framed rather than told straight through. It opens in 1961 with a middle-aged man, Billy Colman, rescuing a Redbone Coonhound from other dogs, and the sight of the animal takes him back to his boyhood. The main narrative then runs decades earlier, with a ten-year-old Billy saving for two years, working odd jobs and walking twenty miles to Tahlequah to collect the pair after spotting a magazine advertisement.

He names the dogs Old Dan and Little Ann after seeing those names carved into a tree on the journey home, and with his grandfather's help he trains them to hunt raccoons. The novel's reputation rests on the relationship between the boy and the two animals rather than on incident, and the setting of the Ozarks is treated as a working landscape with prices, seasons and distances attached. Rawls' book has stayed in print as a standard American children's novel since its first publication.