The Shepherd of the Hills
1907
This is the book that made the Ozarks famous. Published in 1907, Harold Bell Wright's masterpiece follows a wounded stranger known only as the Shepherd who arrives in the remote hills of Mutton Hollow, seeking escape from a life shattered by sorrow. Among the rugged mountaineers, the kindly giant Grant Matthews and his restless son Young Matt, the beautiful Sammy Lane with her dreams of the city, and the proud folk bound by old ways and old grudges, he finds something he didn't expect: a chance to live again. Wright refuses to sentimentalize his Eden. The hills hold both grace and violence, love and loss, the kind and the corrupt. It's a story about what happens when a man broken by the modern world enters a place where life is simple but never easy, where faith is tested by suffering, and where redemption comes not from escaping the world but from learning to inhabit it fully. The novel sold millions and continues to draw pilgrims to Branson, Missouri, where outdoor performances still bring these characters to life over a century later.
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“…I never understood until the past months why the Master so often withdrew alone into the wilderness. There is not only food and medicine for one’s body; there is also healing for the heart and strength for the soul in nature. One gets very close to God…in these temples of God’s own building.””
— Harold Bell Wright
“Here and there among men, there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real… He who sees and hears too much is cursed for a dreamer, a fanatic, or a fool, by the mad mob who, having eyes, see not, ears and hear not, and refuse to understand… ””
— Harold Bell Wright
“We, who live in the cities, see but a little farther than across the street. We spend our days looking at the work of our own and our neighbors' hands. Small wonder our lives have so little of God in them, when we come in touch with so little that God has made.””
— Harold Bell Wright
“while they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.””
— Harold Bell Wright
“Ain't nothin' to a flat country nohow. A man jes naturally wear hisself plumb out a walkin' on a level 'thout ary downhill t' spell him. An' then look how much more there is of hit! Take forty acres o' flat now an' hit's jest a forty, but you take forty acres o' this here Ozark country an' God 'lmighty only knows how much 'twould be if hit war rolled out flat. 'Taint no wonder 't all, God rested when he made these here hills; he jes naturally had t' quit, fer he done his beatenest an' war plumb gin out.””
— Harold Bell Wright
“Her face was a face to go with one through the years, and to live still in one's dreams when the sap of life is gone.””
— Harold Bell Wright
“…the beauty of the hour moved him deeply. “What a marvelous, what a wonderful sight!” He said at last in a low tone. “I do not wonder the boy loves to roam the hills a night like this. Look…! See how soft the moonlight falls on that patch of grass this side of the old tree yonder, and how black the shadow is under that bush, like the mouth of a cave, a witch’s cave. I am sure there are ghosts and goblins in there, with fairies and gnomes, and perhaps a dragon or two. And see, …, how the great hills rise into the sky. How grand, how beautiful the world is! It is good to live, …, though life be sometimes hard, still”
— Harold Bell Wright
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Wright, Harold Bell. The Shepherd of the Hills. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-shepherd-of-the-hills-1b84d31c-d086-412e-816d-e3f121644e95.Wright, H. B. (1907). The Shepherd of the Hills. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-shepherd-of-the-hills-1b84d31c-d086-412e-816d-e3f121644e95Wright, Harold Bell. The Shepherd of the Hills. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-shepherd-of-the-hills-1b84d31c-d086-412e-816d-e3f121644e95.
