The Cherry Pit
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 story-tellers. 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.His first novel was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he  has published twelve 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. He has been called "an  undiscovered continent" (Fred Chappell) and "America's Greatest Unknown  Novelist" (Entertainment Weekly).