A Choice of Weapons by Gordon Parks (1966). Parks' memoir opens with his boyhood in Fort Scott, recounting the poverty, segregation, and violence he witnessed growing up in 1920s Kansas. The book is a classic of American autobiography, and the Fort Scott chapters give the town a literary dimension that most small Kansas cities lack. Indispensable reading before or after a visit.
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks (1963). A semi-autobiographical novel set in Cherokee Flats, Kansas (clearly based on Fort Scott), following a young Black boy coming of age in a racially divided small town. Parks later adapted it into a film, which became the first Hollywood studio film directed by a Black director.
Bleeding Kansas by Nicole Etcheson (2004). The best scholarly account of the violent struggle over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free or slave state. Fort Scott and its surrounding county were at the epicentre of these conflicts, and Etcheson's research makes sense of a chaotic period that is easy to misread.