It’s Children’s Book Week! And you can celebrate with us in the University Libraries.
Charles J. Finger clowning for the camera while living in San Angelo, New Mexico in 1902. From the Charles J. Finger Papers (MC639), box 10, folder 1. Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries.
Established in 1919, CBW is the longest running literacy campaign in the country. If you’re a fan of children’s literature like we are, check out the Learning Resources for Children Collection in Mullins Library. It includes books by local authors such as Charles J. Finger who received the Newbery Award in 1925 for Tales from Silver Lands, which he wrote after moving to Fayetteville.
Originally from England, Finger was something like an early Fayetteville version of “the most interesting man in the world.” He worked as everything from a labor organizer in England to a gold prospector in South America. He was an Andean expedition guide and shepherd, a music teacher and rancher in New Mexico, and a railroad manager before pursuing his writing career as a journalist, novelist, and editor.
Finger’s personal and professional papers (MC639) are open to researchers in the Libraries’ Special Collections. Learn more about the collection and how to access it with the finding aid here.
He and his family eventually settled a homestead called “Gayeta” just southwest Fayetteville (near Finger Park today) where he pursued writing and editing full time.
Finger eventually wrote 36 books, numerous fiction and non-fiction paperback volumes, edited book series and literary journals, and even served as an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project on the Arkansas Guide Series during the New Deal. His 1924 award winning book includes stories he collected (or imagined) in travels through central and South America. There are also gorgeous black and white and color woodcut prints by Paul Honoré, a popular artist and illustrator with whom Finger collaborated often.
Title page from the first edition of Tales from Silver Lands by Charles J. Finger in the Arkansas Collection in the University of Arkansas Libraries.
Pages 98 and 99, the beginning of “The Magic Ball,” in Tales of Silver Lands, with another beautiful woodcut print by Paul Honoré.
Writers from across the country and England visited Finger at Gayeta, including the poet Edgar Lee Masters and fellow Newberry Award-winner Elizabeth Coatsworth, as well as Paul Honoré, his collaborator and illustrator. Local writers and intellectuals such as Charles Morrow Wilson and J. William Fulbright were also frequent guests of Finger, who earned the nickname “the Squire of Gayeta.”
Finger working in his library and other scenes from his home, Gayeta, southwest of Fayetteville, ca. 1930. From the scrapbook of the “Spider & Skillet” hiking club for local writers, of which Finger was member, included in the Margaret Reynolds Collection (MC783), Special Collections, University of Arkansas Libraries.
For more information on the writing and remarkable life of Charles J. Finger, there are several good sources. Archivist and expert on Arkansas writers, Ethel Simpson, has provided an excellent entry for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas as well as a scholarly treatment, “C.J. Finger in Fayetteville: the Last Horizon,” for the August 2013 issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly. In 1981, Flashback, the journal of the Washington County Historical Society, dedicated two articles by Mary Ann Spain and Marguerite Gilstrap, along with transcriptions from the family’s records from Gayeta and Finger’s papers, for a special issue on “the Squire.”
Contact Special Collections to access Finger’s personal and professional papers along with first editions of all his works, as well as editions of very nearly every book by Arkansas authors.