University of North Carolina Press, 2002

The Ozarks have long suffered from an image problem. Even compared with Appalachia—itself no stranger to degrading stereotypes and blatant misrepresentation—these other southern highlands have been exceptionally maligned. One of the region’s few definitive studies, folklorist Vance Randolph’s The Ozarks, was tellingly subtitled An American Survival of Primitive Society; he pronounced the area one of the “the most backward and deliberately unprogressive regions of the United States.”