Works by
Donald Harington
(Writer)
[1935- November 7, 2009]

Fiction

• Enduring (September 1, 2009)
  Forty years ago, Donald Harington created a little town of Stay More, hidden away in the hills of the Ozarks. He populated it with generations of families that had escaped the Appalachians in serach of more room, greener pastures, freedom from convention, sweeter air and water, or, simply, a world where time and history don't matter. In Enduring, Harington continues the themes of the Stay More series and reveals, for the first time, the mysteries of the life of Latha Bourne, the heroine and demigoddess of Lightning Bug, The Choiring of the Trees, and other Harington classics, who is set apart from her fellow Stay Morons, as Harington affectionately calls them, by her beauty, wit, mystery and intense, unfulfilled sexuality.

• Farther Along (2008)
  He wants to get away from it all. Despite a satisfying career as chief curator of a museum devoted to the vanished American past, he finds he himself wants to vanish. So with the help of a book on the life and culture of a vanished tribe of Indians known as Bluff-dwellers, he takes up residence in the wilderness of the Ozark mountains, with only a dog for company and only an atlatl - a primitive spear thrower - to provide him with his supper. His few amusements are the playing of tunes on a hair-comb-and-tissue and writing what he intends to be an indictment of modern civilization in his journals. He makes the acquaintance of a young moonshiner who keeps him supplied abundantly with corn liquor. But after six years of this life he realizes that what he is trying to get away from is himself.
  
  Two women try to save him from drinking himself to death: an elderly widow who was once the postmistress of the abandoned town down in the valley, and a lovely but mysterious redhead who may or may not be the incarnation of the mistress of the fabled man who had founded the town ages ago.
  
  The title of this latest gem comes from a folk hymn commonly sung at funerals, "Farther along we'll know all about it, farther along we'll understand why." With the gentle humor and earthy passion that characterize all of his novels, Donald Harington attempts to offer some knowing and some understanding, farther along.

• The Pitcher Shower (2005)
  Every time Hoppy enters a town in his truck, he is greeted with delight and anticipation, showered with warmth, offered meals, and more often than not, pretty girls trying to catch more than just his eye. It's not that Hoppy is so special; it's the pitcher shows that he brings with him, the shoot-'em-ups and giddyappers that all the Ozark folk adore that have them lining up to welcome him. Hoppy's predictable routine and his struggles with his own self-loathing are challenged when a teenager succeeds in stowing away in his truck and proves to be a lot more than he seems. Together they contend with a wily traveling preacher who dogs their heels, trying to steal away their audience with his message of salvation. This peddler of the Gospel is just as bent on making money as the peddler of the motion pitcher, and in his cunning he steals all of Hoppy's cowboy pitchers. The pitcher shower has no choice but to buy the only available pitcher he can find, a strange pitcher called A Midsummer Night's Dream, and hope that it will prove popular with audiences who expect horses and Hopalong Cassidy.

• With (2003)
  WITH is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationships and only the company of animals and an 'inhabit', the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most fascinating, triumphant and original stories of survival, coming-of-age and love ever told.

• Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)
  Harington returns to "Stay More" to document the uproarious attempt of native son, Vernon Ingledew to earn the governorship of his great, if sometimes much-maligned, state. But, to his own shock, Ingledew - a handsome but less than telegenic ham magnate and self-educated polymath - is hampered by what his opponents refer to as his Thirteen Albatrosses. Among them: he is an atheist; he never attended college; he lives in sin with his first cousin, Jelena; he displays a hysterically cryptic vocabulary. Not to mention the fact that he also supports "extirpating" - that is, getting rid of - hospitals, schools, prisons, tobacco, and handguns. Nevertheless, his candidacy quickly attracts the heaviest political hitters. This battle-tested band, known as Ingledew's Seven Samurai, are challenged not only by Vernon's extensive and dazzling liabilities, but also by kidnappings, the advent of adulterous liaisons within their own camp, and the unrelenting evil-doing of detested adversary Governor Shoat Bradfield, a model of corruption who purchased his high school equivalency certificate from a later-jailed school official. Moving from the shady lanes of "Stay More" and Vernon's palatial, double-domed retreat to the smoky warrens of cosmopolitan "Little Rock", "Thirteen Albatrosses" knowingly chronicles the dizzying display of nonsense and idealism that is contemporary politics.

• When Angels Rest (1998)
  During World War II, real news is a rare commodity in the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. But twelve year old Dawny - inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle - finds enough local colour to keep the townsfolk reading his weekly newspaper, The Stay Morning Star. Dawny reports on the war between the Allies and the Axis, two roving bands of boys and girls fighting with sticks and spears, and competing in scrap drives and verbal jousts. But the tenor of these games changes as developments bring the world's war closer to home...

• Butterfly Weed (1996)
  The raucous and poignant story of Doc Swain describes how he becomes a physician without attending medical school, his ability to heal patients with the ""dream cure,"" his pursuit by a student and a music teacher from the high school at which he teaches, and the heartbreaking choices he must make.

• Ekaterina (1993)
  The newest resident of a faculty mansion inhabited by ghosts and filled with drunks, writer Ekaterina soon takes over the top floor of the Halfmoon Hotel in Arcata Springs, where she takes on pubescent lovers.

• The Choiring of the Trees (1991)
  Arkansas, 1914: A 13 year old girl is raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. On her testimony, Nail Chism, from Stay More, is convicted and sentenced to the electric chair - until his innocence is championed by the staff artist of the state's leading newspaper, a woman whose past amongst the artists in Paris is even stranger and more solitary than Nail's. Will she succeed in saving Nail? Or will the singing - "Choiring" - of the trees that Nail hears while strapped into the chair be the last earthly (or unearthly) sound he will ever hear?

• The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)
  With this wonderfully irreverent comic novel, Harington leaves off chronicling the human inhabitants of the Arkansas Ozark town of Stay More and turns his attention to its insect world. In depicting the cockroach community, who perambulate on gitalongs, apprehend their environment through sniff whips and commit unwitting malapropisms about the mysterious world of Man (and Woman), Harington unleashes a sprightly, antic imagination.

• The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)
  Jacob and Noah Ingledew trudge 600 miles from their native Tennessee to found Stay More, a small town nestled in a narrow valley that winds among the Arkansas Ozarks and into the reader's imagination. The Ingledew saga - which follows six generations of 'Stay Morons' through 140 years of abundant living and prodigal loving - is the heart of Harington's jubilant, picaresque novel. Praised as one of the year's ten best novels by the American Library Association when first published, this tale continues to captivate readers with its winning fusion of lyricism and comedy.

• Some other Place. The Right Place. (1972)
  It is June. Diana Stoving's new Porsche has just broken down on the Garden State Parkway, and Diana, twenty-one, freshly graduated from Sarah Lawrence, sits in a dealer's showroom, waiting for repairs. Bored and impatient, Diana leafs through the local newspaper - and by pure chance reads the news item that will change the course of her life, that will launch her on a year's journey, a year of the strangest adventures she could ever hope to endure, suffer and enjoy. For it is this news item that leads her to meet Day Whittacker, a shy, eighteen-year-old Eagle Scout, who his high school English teacher, experimenting with 'age regression' claims is the reincarnation of a hellraising ocntryman named Daniel Lyam Montross, a man who had lived a wild, romantic life and died a violent death - twenty years earlier.
  
  Together, Day and Diana disappear from New Jersey, setting out to explore the life and investigate the death of the man known as Daniel Lyam Montross. Through ghost towns and abandoned villages they journey, becoming in turn, amateur archaeologists, naturalists, sleuthss, historians, and inevitably and ultimately, lovers.
  
  And always the presence of Daniel Lyam Montross is with them. Dead, he is fated to die again. Is one or both of them also fated to die?
  
  One of Harington's most devious narratives, and a precursor to the Stay More cycle.

• Lightning Bug (1970)
  Latha Bourne, the attractive postmistress of Stay More - a small town in the Arkansas Ozarks - didn't expect to see Every Dill again. More than ten years before he had raped her, robbed the bank, and vanished leaving her pregnant. Now Every has the nerve to reappear. An erotic yet innocent tale of loss and of finding.

• The Cherry Pit (1965)
  Clifford Stone--quixotic curator of arcane Americana at a Boston antiques foundation and cataloguer of our "Vanished American Past"--forsakes Boston and his icy wife to return to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a life that is both instantly familiar and disturbingly strange.
  
  Cliff's journey home begins as a recovery mission, but it becomes a desperate search for, confrontation with, immersion in, and emergence from his lost past. In a series of libidinous, murderous, hilarious and anxious adventures, Cliff renews old friendships--including one with a girl he thought he'd forgotten--and makes some new enemies.
  
  The Cherry Pit is a flamboyant, lascivious, comic novel about restoration and renewal--and, like all proper comic novels, a serious book.

Non-fiction

• On a Clear Day: The Paintings of George Dombek, 1975-1994 (1995)

• Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns (1986)
  This work brilliantly fuses travel narrative with history and cultural studies - yet reads like a novel. It's also a love story that is in no way fictional. A fan letter to the author from a woman named Kim starts a correspondence which details research she's conducting in one-horse towns throughout Arkansas. In the years of rural decline many of these towns dwindled to church, post office, general store, gas station, and a few rundown houses - but every house has a porch, every porch a rocker, and every rocker an old man or woman with a story. Kim and Don agree to collaborate on a book - this one - creating a unique and enchanting work about towns that will never again be their old selves and towns that never fulfilled the brave dreams of their founders. And at the end of the adventure the author and Kim meet, having learned something of expectation and hope - and love. It includes photos and maps.

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