Abstract

William Allen White called himself a prairie town boy, and he celebrated the prairie in his writing. From his earliest fiction, The Real Issue (1896), to his final novel, In the Heart of a Fool (1918), to his Autobiography (1946), White’s natural world is the Kansas he grew up in and loved as “the fairest of the world’s habitations.”

Keywords:

• William Allen White,
• prairie,
• poem,
• stories,
• El Dorado,
• literature,
• Emporia,
• Kansas State Teachers College,
• words,
• wood,
• barn,
• Flint Hills,
• wonder,
• landscape,
• grassland,
• woodland,
• wild,
• heritage,
• beauty,
• preserve,
• past