Donald Harington
Donald Harington was an influential Southern regional writer known for his distinct fictional universe centered in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. Born in 1935 in Little Rock and raised in the nearby village of Drakes Creek, Harington's personal experiences profoundly shaped his literary work. His primary setting is the fictional town of Stay More, often populated by the quirky residents known as the Stay Morons. Harington's writing integrates experimental techniques and themes from postmodernism, Magical Realism, and ghost stories, drawing comparisons to other notable authors like William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez.
He published his first novel, *The Cherry Pit*, in 1965, receiving critical acclaim, and is perhaps best known for *The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks*, which weaves a generational narrative through the lens of Magical Realism. Throughout his career, Harington faced personal challenges, including the loss of loved ones and health issues, but he continued to write and teach, ultimately retiring from the University of Arkansas. His works often feature recurring characters and complex narratives that reflect his unique perspective on life in the Ozarks, making him a distinctive voice in Southern literature.
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Donald Harington
Author
- Born: December 22, 1935
- Birthplace: Little Rock, Arkansas
- Died: November 7, 2009
Biography
Donald Harington is primarily a Southern regional writer. Like William Faulkner, he takes one or two counties in a Southern state as the locale for nearly all of his novels. For Harington, the setting is the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, though he sometimes places his stories in Little Rock, Arkansas. His fictive town is called Stay More (sometimes Stick Around) and its inhabitants are the Stay Morons. Harington tells his stories by using experimental techniques connected to postmodernist writing, Magical Realism, and ghost stories.
Harington was born in 1935 in Little Rock, Arkansas, to Conrad Harington and Jimmie Walker. He spent his summers in his mother’s small village, Drakes Creek, near Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the Ozarks, and he draws upon these childhood memories extensively in his fiction. At age twelve, he contracted meningitis, which left him almost deaf. Encouraged by an older brother, he began reading widely. Harington attended the University of Arkansas, graduating in 1956. The next year he married Nita Harrison, with whom he had three daughters. He received an M.F.A. in studio art from the University of Arkansas in 1958 and an M.A. in art history from Boston University in 1959. He started to attend a Ph.D. program at Harvard University but dropped out and took a teaching position at Bennett College in Millbrook, New York, for two years.
Encouraged by the writer William Styron, he resigned his position to concentrate on writing. His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published in 1965 and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Best First Novel award. He then returned to teaching at Windham College in Putney, Vermont, where he remained until the college closed in 1978. He became close friends with John Irving, another budding novelist, both producing novels at regular intervals. In 1979, Harington separated from his wife, and they were later divorced in the year his father died. With loss of job, wife, and father, Harington went to pieces for a while, returning to Fayetteville in 1982 to find himself. In 1986, he took a position teaching art history at the University of Arkansas, where he remained until his retirement. He survived a bout of throat cancer that struck him in 1993.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks: A Novel (1975) is perhaps his best-known novel. It constitutes a history of Stay More from 1830 until 1970, written in the style of Magical Realism similar to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Each character in the generations of a single family is associated with a different kind of house. In this book, as in many of his novels, Harington is featured as a character. Other literary influences are found in his novels The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989), where Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is the subtext, and Ekaterina (1993), which has many parallels with Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita.
Many of Harington’s characters appear in more than one novel, sometimes as ghosts. For instance, With (2004) describes how Robin Kerr grew up alone in the Ozarks, helped to survive by a live ghost who used to live in the mountains. The Choiring of the Trees (1991) set in 1914 Arkansas, also features characters who were previously developed in other novels.