Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described hack writer, he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph s first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph s interests in language, in...