Horace Sowers Kephart (September 8, 1862 – April 2, 1931) was an American travel writer and librarian, best known as the author of Our Southern Highlanders (a memoir about his life in the Great Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina) and the classic outdoors guide Camping and Woodcraft.

Horace Kephart found his way to western North Carolina, where he lived in the Hazel Creek section of what would later become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park[4] I took a topographic map and picked out on it, by means of the contour lines and the blank space showing no settlement, what seemed to be the wildest part of these regions; and there I went.

[3] The Mountain Heritage Center and Special Collections at Hunter Library, Western Carolina University have created a digitized online exhibit called "Revealing an Enigma" that focuses on Horace Kephart's life and works.

[8][9] While mostly a manual of living outdoors, Kephart interspersed his philosophy: Your thoroughbred camper likes not the attentions of a landlord, nor will he suffer himself to be rooted to the soil by cares of ownership or lease.

The sleek comeliness of pasture it too prim and artificial, domestic cattle have a meek and ignoble bearing, fields of grain are monotonous to his eyes, which turn for relief to abandoned old-field, overgrown with thicket, that still harbors some the shy children of the wild.