Opie Read

Opie Percival Read (born December 22, 1852, Nashville Tennessee; d. November 2, 1939, Chicago Illinois) was an American journalist and humorist.

Prior to 1887, Opie Read edited five separate newspapers, all in the U.S. South: the Statesville Argus, the Bowling Green Pantograph, and the Louisville Courier-Journal, all in Kentucky, as well as the Evening Post, and Gazette in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Read brought the Arkansas Traveler, a flowing pen, and a command of Southern dialect to Chicago in 1887.

His authorial productivity noticeably slackened during the thirty remaining years of his life, although he did publish six additional books (two of them juveniles).

Many later critics have dismissed Read as a presenter of lower-class white Southern stereotypes for middle-class Northerners.