Opie Read

Biography

Opie Percival Read was the youngest of ten children born to Guilford and Elizabeth Wallace Read. He was raised on his parent's plantation near Gallatin, Tennessee and later attended Neophagen College in Nashville. Prior to his enrollment, Read had worked for the Franklin (KY) Patriot Newspaper where he learned to set type. A skill that would later help pay his way through college working for the school newspaper. Read would go on to be the editor of the Little Rock Gazette and the Cleveland Leader. In 1882 Read and Philo D. Benham founded the Arkansas Traveler. Five years later Read and Benham moved their popular humor based paper from Little Rock to Chicago. There Read became a prolific contributor of stories about Southern life to a number of national publications. He would also author several bestsellers over the waning years of the nineteenth century and the birth of the twentieth century. His most successful book "The Jucklins" (1895) stayed in print for the better part of twenty years. "Len Gansett" (1882) and "The Turkey Egg Griffin" (1905), were also well received by the public. Read also achieved some notoriety on the lecture circuit talking about life in the South. On 30 June, 1881, Read married his partner's sister, Ada Benam. The couple would go on to have three sons and three daughters. Ada would pass away in 1928, a week shy of her seventy-seventh birthday. Their daughter Enid died some ten years earlier while still in her early twenties. Opie Read's romantic style of writing had fallen out of favor with the reading public by the 1920s and has been largely overlooked since.