Nothing like the book.

Yes, the book is almost nothing like the movie and it turns out this is a critical work in American literature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Bell_Wright

Harold Bell Wright, (May 4, 1872 - May 24, 1944), was a best-selling American writer of fiction, essays, and non-fiction during the first half of the 20th century. Although mostly forgotten or ignored after the middle of the 20th century, he is said to have been the first American writer to sell a million copies of a novel and the first to make $1 million from writing fiction.

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Wright's second novel, The Shepherd of the Hills, published in 1907 and set in Branson, Missouri, that established him as a best-selling author. That book also attracted a growing stream of tourists to the little-known town of Branson, resulting in its becoming a major tourist destination.

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Many, if not most, authors, literary critics, librarians and schoolteachers despised Wright's tales as much as the preachers did. Wright's biographer, Lawrence V. Tagg (Harold Bell Wright: Storyteller to America, Westernlore Press, 1986), has gathered an impressive collection of contemporary attacks on Wright. Owen Wister’s comments are representative: “I doubt if the present hour furnishes any happier symbols [of the quack novel] than we have in Mr. Wright [and The Eyes of the World]. It gathers into its four hundred and sixty pages all the elements ...of the quack-novel. It is,” Wister says, “stale, distorted, a sham, a puddle of words,” and “a mess of mildewed pap.” It was also number one on the Publisher's Weekly bestseller list for 1914. In 1946, Irvin Harlow Hart wrote, "Harold Bell Wright supplied more negative data on the literary quality of the taste of the fiction reading public than any other author. No critic has ever damned Wright with even the faintest praise." (Hundred Leading Authors, p. 287)

Wright never responded to his critics, except to say that he never intended to create great literature, only to minister to ordinary people.

In 1945 Frank Luther Mott developed a system to compare top selling books from 1665 (Golden Multitudes, the Story of Bestsellers in the United States). To make comparisons possible, Mott defines a bestseller as a book with sales equal to one percent of the U.S. population. His ranking: Charles Dickens, 16 bestsellers; Earl Stanley Gardner, seven; Walter Scott, six; and James Fenimore Cooper, Gene Stratton Porter, and Harold Bell Wright, five each. Scott and Dickens were not American authors, and Gardner came much later than Wright. By Mott's reckoning Harold Bell Wright was one of only three American authors to write five best sellers from the arrival of the pilgrims in America through the first quarter of the 20th century. And Wright's total book sales were higher than Cooper and Porter. No American beat, or quite matched, Harold Bell Wright's record until Earl Stanley Gardner, whose career peaked 30 years after Wright's.

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If you wish to read it you can download it here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4735

And that's a good thing. The movie is superior.

It's a shame. Harold Bell Wright's story is the best novel I have ever read. It used to be required reading in public schools but they did away with it because of the whole "God" aspect. Quite the shame that this once mega-popular book is so unknown, only realized by those who vacation to the beautiful Ozarks.

If you havn't already done so, read the book. It gets better every time.

You're correct in your evaluation, but your opinion that the book is better is contrary to that of several repliers in this forum, including myself. Harold Bell Wright's works were inovative for his time but are too simple for the readers even as early as 1941 when the movie was filmed. Not enough action. I thought for a while I was reading Anne of Green Gables with predicaments and solutions one right after the other.

Differences between the book and the movie? Jim Lane was not shot by "revenuers," although he was shot and killed by the Ward Bond character later on. There was no animosity between young Matt and Mr. Howard (Howitt in the book). Young Matt lived with his biological parents Grant and Mollie Matthews throughout the book. Pete was actually their grandson, the son of their deceased daughter, thus Young Matt's nephew. Pete's father was Mr. Howard's (Howitt's) long lost son, so Pete was his grandson as well as old Matt's and Mollie's. In the end he died of natural causes.

The movie bears NO resemblance to The Shepherd of the Hills book by Harold Bell Wright. And what a shame! It's a beautiful story! No wonder the people who live here in the REAL Ozarks were fighting mad about it! We were, too! Nothing against the acting, it just should not have been called The Shepherd of the Hills. It's not even "loosely based" on the book. It's insulting!