The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [211]
In its original form, this novel was much more sexually explicit than it is now, replete with such language as “joist,” “beam,” “stud,” “timber,” “pole,” “erection,” “rear elevation,” “door,” “gable,” “sill,” “rail,” and “jamb.” I am very grateful to my editor, Llewellyn Howland iii, for persuading me to leave such things to the reader’s imagination, and I trust that the reader’s imagination has succeeded. My editor was the first person to hear of this project, the first person to encourage it, and the first person to see it when it was finished. In addition to removing certain passages, he made two other sweeping changes of an important nature.
His devoted secretary, Rosemary Gaffney, not only spent many hours making his letters to me legible and coherent, but also spent days tracking down a crucial but elusive doctoral dissertation in the archives of Harvard University. She is simply a wonderful person.
Helpful in a way they did not realize were the few people who wrote letters of appreciation for my previous volumes, and I would like to list them here: George Eades, Katherine Berry, Sandee Jo Joy, Rhode Rapp, Weld Henshaw, Juanita Melchert, Sue Anderson, Mrs. John Ingle, Gretchen Keiser, Linda Gray, Alex Humez, Sharon Karpinski, Joanna Noe, Willie Allen, John Braden, Carol Cross, Eleanor Jacobson, my two United Kingdom “fans,” Capt. Archibald A.J. Dinsmore and Gayle Harrison…and Dione, wherever you are. Without the encouragement of these good people, this book would not exist.
To my students in my architecture classes at Windham College, I am indebted for a spirited give-and-take over the years that has taught me much about architecture, and I apologize to them for never discussing the architecture treated in the present volume.
As to the chapter head illustrations, there is no point in claiming that any resemblance between these buildings and actual buildings living or dead is purely coincidental. Most of these structures no longer stand, but that fact makes them no less “real.” They stood, and that is, like all of us, what matters.
About the Author
Donald Harington
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated the general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published thirteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006 he was awarded Oxford American magazine’s inaugural award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter