Latest ‘Stay More’ Novel Promises That Farther Along We’ll Understand Why

Newswise — A man runs away from himself to live in a remote cave in the Ozarks. Two women, an elderly widow and a mysterious redhead, try to save him from alcohol and despair. Arkansas novelist Donald Harington mixes these individuals with others, both living and dead, to reveal his newest story of Stay More, Ark.

Harington, who had been a professor of art and art history at the University of Arkansas for more than 20 years, has published 14 novels of the imagined Ozark village of Stay More. In the most recent, Farther Along, Stay More is an isolated, abandoned town inhabited by descendents and shadows of characters from previous novels. The title comes from an old hymn commonly sung at Southern funerals. Its chorus promises: "Farther along we'll know all about it, Farther along we'll understand why; Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine, We'll understand it all by and by."

In Farther Along, a man leaves his career as a museum curator to live as a Bluff-dweller, one of a vanished tribe of American Indians. He shares his cave with a dog, lives on venison and plays tunes alone on a hair comb and tissue. Each night he drinks himself to sleep with moonshine produced by the Hermit, an "oddling" from a neighboring mountain. In the end, the Bluff-dweller comes into the town, where he lives as the Dying Man and plays Scrabble with the red-headed woman. His change occurs with the help of the two women and the spirit of Kind.

Harington was born and bred in Little Rock, Ark., and spent most childhood summers with his grandparents in the Ozark hamlet of Drakes Creek. Before losing his hearing to meningitis at age 12, Harington listened to the visitors in his grandparents' general store and post office, absorbing a folk dialect that has nearly vanished from daily speech but lives in the rhythm and language of his novels.

Entertainment Weekly has named Harington "America's Greatest Unknown Writer." The American Library Association listed Harington's The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks as one of the year's 10 best novels in 1975.

He has won the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize and the Heasley Prize, and has been inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. The Winter 2002 issue of Southern Quarterly is a "Donald Harington Special Issue" with tributes from fellow novelists, scholarly essays, interviews and a selection from his 40-year correspondence with William Styron. He received the inaugural Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Farther Along is published by The Toby Press, which also distributes Harington's earlier novels.

Harington, who had been a Distinguished Professor in the department of art in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, retired in May 2008.