Opie Read

Biography

Opie Percival Read entered the world as the tenth and final child on a Gallatin, Tennessee plantation, where the Cumberland River looped like a lazy ribbon through his parents’ land. Before he could spell “typesetter,” the Franklin (KY) Patriot had him slinging lead letters into galleys; the clatter of that press paid his tuition at Neophogen College and bankrolled midnight essays for the campus paper. By his mid-twenties he was steering the Little Rock Gazette, then the Cleveland Leader, but the real roar came in 1882 when he and Philo D. Benham launched the Arkansas Traveler, a weekly wink at Southern foibles that readers snatched off porches faster than possums raid hen houses. In 1887 the two men hauled their humor north, parking the Traveler on Chicago’s Dearborn Street, and Read’s folksy tales—moonlit duels, riverboat gamblers, lovesick sharecroppers—flooded magazines from Harper’s Weekly to The Century. Between 1882 and 1910 he released nearly a novel a year. “Len Gansett” (1882) made front-porch readers laugh through missing teeth; “The Jucklins” (1895) sold so briskly that presses ran dry and stayed in print two full decades; “The Turkey Egg Griffin” (1905) hatched a fresh crop of fans who packed opera houses to hear Read’s drawl roll over footlights like warm molasses. On 30 June 1881 he married Ada Benham—his partner’s sister—who could out-quip him by candlelight. Six children followed: three boys who learned to fish the levee, three girls who learned to read by kerosene. Ada died in 1928, seven days before her seventy-seventh birthday; their daughter Enid had already slipped away a decade earlier, barely into her twenties. When jazz replaced banjos and flappers traded corsets for short skirts, Read’s velvet prose sounded antique. By the time the stock market crashed, his name had vanished from bookshop windows, but the river still bends past Gallatin, and somewhere a dusty Traveler crackles with laughter when the wind riffles its pages.