Brian Walter

An Evening with Novelist

Donald Harington

Rowntree Recital Hall
University of the Ozarks
February 15, 1997

Donald Harington’s career as an internationally recognized author and novelist began with the publication of The Cherry Pit in 1965. A native "Arkansawyer" (as opposed to the mere "Arkansan," a sawyer being one who shapes wood to his own ends), Harington sets most of his novels in the fictional Ozarks town of Stay More -- from the formal Ozarks entreaty to departing guests. Both a gifted story-teller and a delightful narrative experimenter, Harington populates his world with characters who are at once original and recognizable, figures of slyness and sincerity, of passion and playfulness, of glibness and expressive silence.

In addition to his accomplishments as a novelist, Harington has been recognized for his contributions in creative research and teaching over the span of a lengthy professional career. He has carried away awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Association for State and Local History, and the University of Arkansas Alumni Association (for distinguished teaching).

Books by Donald Harington:

Fiction
Butterfly Weed, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996
Ekaterina, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993
The Choiring of the Trees, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991
The Cockroaches of Stay More, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks: A Novel, Little, Brown, 1975
Some Other Place. The Right Place., Little, Brown, 1972
Lightning Bug, Seymour Lawrence, Delacorte, 1970
The Cherry Pit, Random House, 1965

Nonfiction
On a Clear Day: The Paintings of George Dombeck, U. of Central Arkansas Press, 1995
Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986

From Ekaterina (1993)

"We will find ourselves with equal pieces: each having one rook, one bishop, one knight. Steadily we will remove these from each other until I am left with a bishop, he with a rook, which is trying to protect a pawn seeking queendom, but futilely, because of my bishop’s aim on her. Ingraham will look at his watch yet again. "I’m really going to catch hell from my wife," he will say. We will be in the seventy-third move of our endgame.

"I will resign myself (not resigning the game, which is almost stalemated) to Ingraham’s eventual departure. The future tense will be able to keep him only so long. I will be tempted to ask for his cards and write upon them a final message of some sort, a proper word of thanks, perhaps, a good-bye, a farewell, a reminder of our responsibilities to each other in sworn brotherhood, some acceptable ending for him, who hates endings and cannot write them."
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Portions of this program were borrowed and adapted from Stay More: The Donald Harington Home-Page, created and maintained by Jason Pennington and Steve Reed, 1996.