Opie Percival Read (1852-1939) was a prolific American journalist and humourist. His bibliography lists 60 published books. Prior to 1887, he edited five separate newspapers, all in the U. S. South: the Statesville Argus, the Bowling Green Pantograph, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Little Rock Evening Post, and the Little Rock Gazette, ancestor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. In 1882, Read founded his own humour magazine, the Arkansas Traveler, which he carried on after leaving newspaper journalism in 1887. He published 54 separate books, of which 31 were novels, 18 were book-length compilations of short fiction such as that published in the Arkansas Traveler, and five were works of non-fiction. Amongst his other works are An Arkansas Planter (1896), Old Ebenezer (1897), The Starbucks (1902) and I Remember (1930).