Who’s Your Pick For Greatest Upland Writer?

I have never been – due to both personal nature and modest financial standing – a very materialistic, “thing”-focused person. I’ve found that the pursuit of said things can get you in trouble, so I try to approach most areas of my life from an austere, minimalist aesthetic. Or at least that’s what I like to tell people. In reality I’m simply a cheapskate. But there are a few areas in which even I can’t deny that I am, shall we say…weak.

For whatever reason I can’t seem to resist shotguns, fishing tackle and books. For these things I am a total sucker, and I’ve amassed through various and sundry wheelings and dealings (all perfectly legal, I assure you) collections of all three which are completely out of proportion to my income tax bracket. You call it a vice. I call it a talent…

The Bobwhite Quail Book

At any rate, I’d like to talk books today, if for no other reason than I’m wrestling with the dilemma of trying to decide the question of who is the greatest quail hunting writer of all time? It’s not as easy or even as straightforward a question as it appears. The criteria for such a list is nebulous, to say the least.

First, how do you measure great? By popularity? Critical acclaim? Number of books or articles sold? And what, exactly, constitutes a “quail hunting” writer? Robert Ruark was a great writer of quail hunting stories, but was he a quail hunting writer? Same for Bill Tarrant’s gundogs column for Field & Stream. I probably learned more about quail hunting from reading his dog stories than just about anything else, but he certainly wasn’t a quail hunting writer.

And what about writers who write (or wrote, if they’re now in the past tense…) about other upland species as much or more than quail? Should that be a disqualification?

See, it’s confusing, isn’t it? After much thought, I finally decided that to be fair I needed to just open it up and include anyone who at some point has penned stories about quail hunting, regardless of genre.

With that out of the way, I could start thinking about names. Do I go with someone from the generally acknowledged (if perhaps a bit dated to some) classics, writers like Archibald Rutledge, Havilah Babcock, Corey Ford, Robert Ruark? Or maybe someone a bit more modern, but who’s still considered old-school? Charley Waterman, Gene Hill, Robert F. Jones, Joel Vance? Or maybe even someone from the world of the novelist: Vance Bourjaily, Richard Ford, Guy de la Valdene?

The fact is, there are a lot of great writers who have trained their writer’s gaze on the upland world, and I’m not sure I could pick a favorite if I had to. Here are just a few (among many) of my own personal favorites in no particular order (and not all of them deal exclusively with quail hunting).

The Old Man and the Boy, by Robert Ruark

My Health is Better in November, by Havilah Babcock

The Trickiest Thing in Feathers, by Corey Ford

The Tattered Autumn Sky, by Tom Davis

Spook: Tales of a Bird Dog, by David Henderson

Pretty much anything by Robert F. Jones or Gene Hill

Bobs, Brush and Brittanies, by Joel Vance

Bill Tarrant’s Gun Dog Book: A Treasury of Happy Tails

The Bobwhite Quail Book (anthology), edited by Lamar Underwood

And of course this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface, really. Upland literature is both broad and deep, and I could easily take this list several pages longer, but I’d like to hear a few of yours. Who are some of your favorite upland/quail hunting writers?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 25th, 2011 and is filed under Dogs, Hunting, Outdoors, Quail. Both comments and pings are currently closed.