I recently saw the movie with John Wayne on utube, so i decided to read the book. They have little to do with one another, and that surprised me. Also what got me was how colloquially it was written. Not just the speech but the actual narrative. I read more about the story and its author Harold Bell Wright, and discovered that was his method to attract non-literary readers 100 years ago.
Unfortunately I am not particularly well versed in Ozark slang and found it rough going so I got the plain text from Gutenberg and first re-formatted it and created real chapter headings. The real task though was all the updates to the slang. In the end I changed about 5/6th of the slang to normal American usage, updating the grammar as well and often filling in sentences that were vague.
The result is here over on Scribd.
It’s an interesting parable and has some good points. Of course the effect on Branson Missouri was tremendous but you can also see the pinhead response was Al Capp’s very prejudiced Lil’Abner.
Beverly Hillbillies, the sitcom 25 years after the comic strip, was a great improvement over the comic as is Green Acres, which Harold Bell Wright would have approved of, and remains a personal favorite.
In my anguish... 