The Shepherd of the Hills

Description

The Shepherd of the Hills by Harold Bell Wright

Harold Bell Wright’s masterpiece, The Shepherd of the Hills may be familiar to theater goers and movie enthusiasts, too. However excellent these adaptations may be, their power cannot be compared to the original: a wonderful and moving text about the life of the people living in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri and Arkansas.

The book captivates the reader not only with the multiple plots developing parallel to each other, then intersecting in exactly the right moment. The characters are also masterfully built and the journey is taken not only into the mountains, but into the protagonist’s own self as well. A lonely stranger comes to the Ozarks and makes a very powerful appearance, changing the community’s life and changing himself, too. The story amuses with little, anecdote-like events such as Young Matt’s attempts to conquer Sammy Lane’s heart or the fight between Matt and Wash Gibb for the honorable title “the Strongest Man in the Hills”. The anecdotes on one side are balanced out by much more serious events on the other side – the book is spiced with humor, but it is ultimately about what any good book should be: the eternal fight between good and evil and life, with all its beauty and pain, all told in a fascinating, thought raising way.

Wright’s novel is certainly educational, but it is also heartwarming, making an excellent read for youth and adults alike. If you liked Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, you will certainly love The Shepherd of the Hill, too and not only because the vernacular spoken by the characters is pretty much the same as Mark Twain used in his famous stories, but also because the events are just as well structured and multi-faceted, the characters are just as complex as the characters in Twain’s fictional, but all too real world.
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