Forrest Carter (1925–1979)
Author of The Education of Little Tree
About the Author
Forrest Carter (1925-71) also wrote Josey Wales: Two Westerns.
Series
Works by Forrest Carter
Associated Works
Reader's Digest Condensed Books 1978 v02: Jaws 2 / The Education of Little Tree / The Practice / Excellency (1978) — Author — 38 copies
Reader's Digest Condensed Books: Sunflower • The Passing Bells • The Education of Little Tree • The Mountain Farm (1979) 5 copies
Reader's Digest Auswahlbücher 133 - Ein Schrei in der Nacht. Der Stern der Cherokee. Blindlings. Ich nannte ihn Yukon. (1984) 5 copies
RDCBLP Fireworks for Elspeth | The Education of Little Tree | Rear Window | Zoo Vet (1979) — Author — 3 copies
Reader's Digest Condensed Books: The Devil's Alternative • The Education of Little Tree • The Tightrope Walker • The North Runner — Author — 2 copies
Het Beste Boek 109: De opvoeding van Kleine Boom / De grote brug / Geen uitweg mogelijk / De stilte van het noorden (1983) 2 copies, 1 review
Marie Curie - L'uomo di Pietroburgo - "Piccolo albero" - A cuore aperto — Author — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Carter, Asa Earl
- Other names
- Carter, Forrest
- Birthdate
- 1925-09-24
- Date of death
- 1979-06-07
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Colorado
- Occupations
- Author, Broadcasting, Politics, Speechwriter
- Organizations
- Ku Klux Klan
Northern Alabama Citizen's Council
American State's Rights Association - Awards and honors
- The American Booksellers Book of the Year (ABBY) award (for "The Education of Little Tree")
- Relationships
- Wallace, George C.
- Short biography
- Asa Carter was a speechwriter for Alabama politician George Wallace in the 1960s, but gained more fame in the '70s and '80s as novelist Forrest Carter, whose book "The Education of Little Tree" was a bestseller. The book purported to be an autobiographical account of growing up in Tennessee with Cherokee grandparents. First published in 1976 (and re-issued in 1986), it was considered by many to be an instant classic of Native American literature. After Carter died (from injuries he got in a 1979 fistfight), it was revealed that he was, in fact, Asa Earl Carter, a former radio announcer and Ku Klux Klan member, and that his "autobiography" was a work of fiction.
Carter also wrote Gone To Texas (1973), which became the Clint Eastwood movie The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976).
http://www.answers.com/topic/asa-earl...See Carter's biography in the online Encyclopedia of Alabama. - Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Anniston, Alabama, Etats-Unis
- Places of residence
- Anniston, Alabama, USA
Sweetwater,Texas, USA
Abilene, Texas, USA - Place of death
- Abilene, Texas, USA
- Burial location
- Anniston, Alabama, USA
DeArmanville Methodist Church, east of Oxford, Alabama, USA - Map Location
- Alabama, Etats-Unis
- Associated Place (for map)
- Alabama, USA
Members
Discussions
Who wrote "The Education of Little Tree"? in Indigenous Peoples (July 2014)
Reviews
I don't think I've cried so hard over the last chapters of a book since I was a little girl and Charlotte said her last goodbye to Wilbur. This is one of those classics that is a classic for a reason. Sad, funny, and beautiful by turns, the story of Little Tree's childhood being raised by his Cherokee grandparents in a fiercely independent mountain community during the Depression is well worth reading. The story, the characters, the prose, the nods to history--all of it is superbly show more executed.
Edit: I tend to skim over author biographies in older books and wasn't aware that a)this had been marketed as a memoir for years and b)the author is/was DEEPLY problematic. I still loved the book. show less
Edit: I tend to skim over author biographies in older books and wasn't aware that a)this had been marketed as a memoir for years and b)the author is/was DEEPLY problematic. I still loved the book. show less
Sweet, now Bitter
It's 2024 and I'm here to reduce my rating from 3 stars to 1 star. Why go back to a book I read in the 1990s and change my assessment? Because Forrest Carter was a terrible racist. How racist? He was a member of the KKK and heartily, loudly promoted segregation a mere decade or so before this book was published. And the thought that he wrote as if he was of Cherokee culture, not possessing just some fractional heritage in his DNA, was all too much.
The book was sweet and I show more enjoyed it when I read it unawares, but now it is bitter and false on every level.
What was this man thinking? Was this book an apology of some sort? As Forrest Carter he denied he was also active segregationist Asa Earl Carter after the deception was discovered in the 70s. Had he admitted it then and publicly denounced his former acts then that, my friends, would be an apology.
This book does not deserve its current 4.13 star reader average, not for its false content nor its craft. It was sweet and touching but, good gravy, it was more than a smidge heavy-handed in sappiness.
But it's the entire falsity that has me riled up about a high rating. I apologize for leaving 3 stars even after I learned of the deception, I should have given it some good ol' fashioned backlash and cancel culture on bad humanity right then and there.
Today I take a tiny notch out of that undeserved excellent GR rating.
Prerogatives
Why today?
Because of a different book.
I was about to attempt another stab at reading To the Wedding; GRers that I admire and follow admire it. Deciding maybe some background would help, I read about the author, John Berger. Incidentally, I had read his Ways of Seeing back in the late 70s and continue to be aware of Berger's phrase, "the male gaze," in the Arts. I count it as a gift to generations, dare I say, to posterity.
I still don't know more about To the Wedding, but after learning that Berger's reaction to receiving the Booker prize (for G.) was to donate half those earnings to the British Black Panthers because the Booker family built a large part of their wealth on de facto slavery and exploitation of Caribbean workers, I had to give him more of my admiration -- that's putting his money where his mouth is, for sure. And thus was inspired to more heartily give To The Wedding a more sustained try.
My mind then wandered to a dilemma that I've often tried to resolve to my own satisfaction: does the writer/artist's real life matter or not when assessing their work? In the case of Berger, I apparently thought it did in a good way, urging myself to give To The Wedding more than a 30 page go. In the case of Forrest, his real life also mattered to me because his deceptions made that book go from sweet to shit.
For those others that aren't practicing deception -- let's say, Orson Scott Card -- but simply stating their firm "beliefs" in their public discourse, then I think it's fair, and to be expected, that what they pronounce in their real lives also matters and I can prefer not to suffer ideas that are repugnant to me, and not support those ideas by implication.
So, writers, that's the deal we make: You be you. I'll be me.
I'll suffer the deprivation of your genius (ahem); it's not like the world is short on genius writers who don't dump intolerant garbage onto the public reading table. I'm tolerant of your intolerance, but I won't buy or read your books. Meantime, your deprivation is the dip in revenue and admiration from more than a few readers. And likely from posterity too. show less
It's 2024 and I'm here to reduce my rating from 3 stars to 1 star. Why go back to a book I read in the 1990s and change my assessment? Because Forrest Carter was a terrible racist. How racist? He was a member of the KKK and heartily, loudly promoted segregation a mere decade or so before this book was published. And the thought that he wrote as if he was of Cherokee culture, not possessing just some fractional heritage in his DNA, was all too much.
The book was sweet and I show more enjoyed it when I read it unawares, but now it is bitter and false on every level.
What was this man thinking? Was this book an apology of some sort? As Forrest Carter he denied he was also active segregationist Asa Earl Carter after the deception was discovered in the 70s. Had he admitted it then and publicly denounced his former acts then that, my friends, would be an apology.
This book does not deserve its current 4.13 star reader average, not for its false content nor its craft. It was sweet and touching but, good gravy, it was more than a smidge heavy-handed in sappiness.
But it's the entire falsity that has me riled up about a high rating. I apologize for leaving 3 stars even after I learned of the deception, I should have given it some good ol' fashioned backlash and cancel culture on bad humanity right then and there.
Today I take a tiny notch out of that undeserved excellent GR rating.
Prerogatives
Why today?
Because of a different book.
I was about to attempt another stab at reading To the Wedding; GRers that I admire and follow admire it. Deciding maybe some background would help, I read about the author, John Berger. Incidentally, I had read his Ways of Seeing back in the late 70s and continue to be aware of Berger's phrase, "the male gaze," in the Arts. I count it as a gift to generations, dare I say, to posterity.
I still don't know more about To the Wedding, but after learning that Berger's reaction to receiving the Booker prize (for G.) was to donate half those earnings to the British Black Panthers because the Booker family built a large part of their wealth on de facto slavery and exploitation of Caribbean workers, I had to give him more of my admiration -- that's putting his money where his mouth is, for sure. And thus was inspired to more heartily give To The Wedding a more sustained try.
My mind then wandered to a dilemma that I've often tried to resolve to my own satisfaction: does the writer/artist's real life matter or not when assessing their work? In the case of Berger, I apparently thought it did in a good way, urging myself to give To The Wedding more than a 30 page go. In the case of Forrest, his real life also mattered to me because his deceptions made that book go from sweet to shit.
For those others that aren't practicing deception -- let's say, Orson Scott Card -- but simply stating their firm "beliefs" in their public discourse, then I think it's fair, and to be expected, that what they pronounce in their real lives also matters and I can prefer not to suffer ideas that are repugnant to me, and not support those ideas by implication.
So, writers, that's the deal we make: You be you. I'll be me.
I'll suffer the deprivation of your genius (ahem); it's not like the world is short on genius writers who don't dump intolerant garbage onto the public reading table. I'm tolerant of your intolerance, but I won't buy or read your books. Meantime, your deprivation is the dip in revenue and admiration from more than a few readers. And likely from posterity too. show less
After finishing this book and then delving into several book reviews by Christopher Hitchins where Hitchins thoroughly examines the authors in addition to the authors' works, I decided to do a bit of research myself on some of the authors I had recently read. I started with Forrest Carter (aka Asa Earl Carter) from Anniston, Alabama - just up the road from my home in Birmingham. What happened next was eye-opening. This book, which I found full of stereotypes and quite average despite its show more great reviews, is actually steeped in controversy! I started with the 1991 New York Times' article "The Transformation of a Klansman" by Dan T. Carter. I was fascinated to hear that the New York Times moved The Education of Little Tree, originally published in 1976 and then reprinted in 1986, from its Nonfiction Bestseller List to its Fiction Bestseller List after this story broke. Although some of my fellow GoodReads members still have this book categorized as a memoir - be warned - this one is a hoax, a mocu-memoir written by a former segregationist who successfully re-invented himself late in life. I don't really feel all that duped since I was pretty unconvinced of the book's genuineness even before I researched its author, but I may have read the book differently if I'd known all this before I started. Lesson learned. show less
A sequel to The Outlaw Josey Wales (previously published as The Rebel Outlaw: Josey Wales in 1973 and reprinted in 1975, by a different publisher, as Gone to Texas) and published the same year as that novel's movie adaptation by Clint Eastwood (actor, director), Philip Kaufman and Sonia Chernus (screenplay), The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is a short, competent, pulp-fictional pot-boiler with fairly explicit (and thus, depending on one's sensibilities, stomach-churning) violence and show more pithy, though didactic recitations of the Mexican ruling class's oppression and abuse of the Indian and mestizo under-class that can't help but recall B. Traven's Jungle series. To my mind, that is mostly a good thing, especially given Carter's economy with words.
Set in the late 1860s, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is precipitated by the brutal murder of a supporting character from the previous novel (which I've yet to read), and is set largely in Mexico, near the Sierra Madre mountain range (another congruence with Traven's work, given that he also wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). Wales, a Tennessee mountain man moved to Missouri who served with a pro-Confederacy band of guerrillas, is summoned from his hidden Texas ranch by a one-armed Indian beggar, Pablo (he lost his arm in the mutilations carried out by the forces of the putative "Emperor Maximilian" on captured Mexican troops), who brings him news of his friends' murders at the hands of a band of Rurales led by another would-be Napoleon, Capitan Jesus Escobedo, a self-styled aristocrat who despises the liberal, reformist presidency of the full-blooded Zapotec Indian, Benito Juárez (namesake of Mussolini). Wales sallies forth with only Pablo and a Falstaffian vaquero, Chato Olivares, beside him; because Wales is a mythically doughty warrior -- see also Hawkeye, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, etc. -- he has more than a fighting chance of success.
Carter's prose never quite rises to the heights attained by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard, but his action scenes, and most of the scenes preparing for action, hold one's interest; I could've done with less amateurish use of the exclamation point and capitalized words (describing Wales's unspoken, unpromulgated code of conduct, Carter writes: "But injury to the Code meant -- WAR!" [p. 38] -- and this is one of the less egregious deployments of the exclamation point and all caps, believe it or not). Also of interest here are his admiring descriptions of Apache warfare (the book is dedicated to the Apache), which parallels Traven's sheets of prose praising the Indians in his Jungle novels; the reader interested in the period and the geography should keep his eyes peeled for a very special guest star.
Ultimately, like Traven, Carter himself may well be more interesting than anything he's written: Forrest Carter was the nom de plume of an Alabama segregationist named Asa Earl Carter who was a white supremacist DJ who was fired for being too racist (he also broke with the Alabama Citizen's Council because he refused to tone down his anti-Semitic screeds, whereas the ACC preferred a strictly anti-Negro focus); he went on to become Governor George Wallace's speechwriter, and also founded an independent Ku Klux Klan group and the pro-segregationist monthly The Southerner. As "Forrest Carter" he wrote a fictional "memoir" titled The Education of Little Tree, which purported to relate the life of a part-Cherokee Indian; Oprah Winfrey withdrew her recommendation of the book after she learned of the author's past, thirteen years after blessing it with her imprimatur.
Reading The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, one can't help but wonder at the mental gymnastics that its author had to perform in order to write it: Carter's sympathy for the Indians of the American Southwest and Mexico -- principally the Apache, but also the Cheyenne and the Zapotec -- blends into a general sympathy for the underclasses, and he expressly names the Jews as a part of the underclasses; one wonders if he was trying, towards the end of his life (he would die in 1979), to make amends for his earlier, public stances supporting white supremacy and anti-Semitism. That, or, as in Robert E. Howard's approving descriptions of "savage" blacks, Carter liked the Apache because they were free of the taint of (white) civilization, and thus were stronger, more vigorous, less effete and intellectual. Or some combination thereof.
In any event, reading The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, it's hard not to envision the titular character as played by Clint Eastwood, notwithstanding such non-Eastwoodian details as the thick black mustache that Wales sports. show less
Set in the late 1860s, The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is precipitated by the brutal murder of a supporting character from the previous novel (which I've yet to read), and is set largely in Mexico, near the Sierra Madre mountain range (another congruence with Traven's work, given that he also wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre). Wales, a Tennessee mountain man moved to Missouri who served with a pro-Confederacy band of guerrillas, is summoned from his hidden Texas ranch by a one-armed Indian beggar, Pablo (he lost his arm in the mutilations carried out by the forces of the putative "Emperor Maximilian" on captured Mexican troops), who brings him news of his friends' murders at the hands of a band of Rurales led by another would-be Napoleon, Capitan Jesus Escobedo, a self-styled aristocrat who despises the liberal, reformist presidency of the full-blooded Zapotec Indian, Benito Juárez (namesake of Mussolini). Wales sallies forth with only Pablo and a Falstaffian vaquero, Chato Olivares, beside him; because Wales is a mythically doughty warrior -- see also Hawkeye, Tarzan, Conan the Barbarian, etc. -- he has more than a fighting chance of success.
Carter's prose never quite rises to the heights attained by Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard, but his action scenes, and most of the scenes preparing for action, hold one's interest; I could've done with less amateurish use of the exclamation point and capitalized words (describing Wales's unspoken, unpromulgated code of conduct, Carter writes: "But injury to the Code meant -- WAR!" [p. 38] -- and this is one of the less egregious deployments of the exclamation point and all caps, believe it or not). Also of interest here are his admiring descriptions of Apache warfare (the book is dedicated to the Apache), which parallels Traven's sheets of prose praising the Indians in his Jungle novels; the reader interested in the period and the geography should keep his eyes peeled for a very special guest star.
Ultimately, like Traven, Carter himself may well be more interesting than anything he's written: Forrest Carter was the nom de plume of an Alabama segregationist named Asa Earl Carter who was a white supremacist DJ who was fired for being too racist (he also broke with the Alabama Citizen's Council because he refused to tone down his anti-Semitic screeds, whereas the ACC preferred a strictly anti-Negro focus); he went on to become Governor George Wallace's speechwriter, and also founded an independent Ku Klux Klan group and the pro-segregationist monthly The Southerner. As "Forrest Carter" he wrote a fictional "memoir" titled The Education of Little Tree, which purported to relate the life of a part-Cherokee Indian; Oprah Winfrey withdrew her recommendation of the book after she learned of the author's past, thirteen years after blessing it with her imprimatur.
Reading The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, one can't help but wonder at the mental gymnastics that its author had to perform in order to write it: Carter's sympathy for the Indians of the American Southwest and Mexico -- principally the Apache, but also the Cheyenne and the Zapotec -- blends into a general sympathy for the underclasses, and he expressly names the Jews as a part of the underclasses; one wonders if he was trying, towards the end of his life (he would die in 1979), to make amends for his earlier, public stances supporting white supremacy and anti-Semitism. That, or, as in Robert E. Howard's approving descriptions of "savage" blacks, Carter liked the Apache because they were free of the taint of (white) civilization, and thus were stronger, more vigorous, less effete and intellectual. Or some combination thereof.
In any event, reading The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales, it's hard not to envision the titular character as played by Clint Eastwood, notwithstanding such non-Eastwoodian details as the thick black mustache that Wales sports. show less
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