Boot-Heel Doctor

Fannie Cook’s Boot-Heel Doctor (1941), a novel about sharecroppers in southern Missouri, was published to critical acclaim as a “moving story of human beings trapped in an economic system they do not understand and exploited by ruthless tricksters whom they are powerless to resist” (The Saturday Review). As Rose Feld wrote in the New York Times: “In Boot-Heel Doctor, Fannie Cook tells the story of North Cotton, a community which became the innocent victim of the combined forces of a river’s wrath and mankind’s greed. . . . This book will be remembered . . . for its portrayal of the little men who, under the lash of persecution, rise to the stature of self-respecting manhood.”About the author:Fannie Frank Cook (1893 – 1949) was a writer and social activist who worked for the advanced of Blacks, Jews, women, and the working class. Born to a German-Jewish immigrant family, she began to write as a child, and after completing her bachelor’s at the University of Missouri, received a master’s degree in English from Washington University, where she also taught. In addition to raising her two sons and teaching literature, Cook became active in local politics, including as Chairman of the Education Committee of the League of Women Voters in St. Louis. In 1930, she became chairman of the Race Relations Committee of city’s Community Council, and eventually helped organize the Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Sharecroppers, which bought land for resettlement in what became known as Cropperville. Her first novel, The Hill Grows Steeper, was published in 1938. Before dying of a heart attack in 1949, she published five more novels—all of them portraying social ills with the goal of using literature to influence public opinion and to increase awareness of racial in justice in the United States. Read more