The Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks

THE BEAUTIFUL AND ENDURING OZARKS
by Leland Payton
$19.95; paper; 8 x 8
ISBN: 978-0-9673925-0-0

The Beautiful and Enduring Ozarks has a distinctly non-touristic perspective. Leland Payton’s photographs focus on wild rivers, back roads, villages, country churches, and farmers with sun-etched faces. Quotes from early explorers and geographers support his concept that the Ozarks has always been, and will likely remain, a cultural and ecological refuge from the changes that sweep over it. A reader praised the book as ”a crystallization, a naming of all that uniqueness as I find in the Ozarks…a modern classic.”

Payton has an especially soft spot for local color, such as the hill-country characters made famous in the paintings of native Ozarker Thomas Hart Benton and whose descendants are still very much a part of the landscape. This quirky book is every bit as iconoclastic as the people and places Payton writes about and photographs

– June Sawyers,
The Resourceful Traveler, Chicago Tribune

The book is beautifully written, illustrated and put together. It does an excellent job of providing an understanding of the Ozarks. It gives one a feeling for the true Ozarks.

– Dr. Oscar (Oz) Hawksley,
author of Missouri Ozark Waterways

The text is both laugh-out-loud funny and quietly tender. It’s the best way to show others (“fer’ners,” that is) what they’re missing in the Ozarks.

– Kate Klise, journalist and author

Click on the image to see the full spread.

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