The Guestroom Novelist ― A Donald Harington Miscellany

The Guestroom Novelist: A Donald Harington Miscellany gathers extensive interviews and previously unpublished or uncollected essays, articles, and reviews by the Arkansawyer novelist—“America’s greatest unknown writer,” according to Entertainment Weekly. Together, these pieces reveal how a life of devastating losses and disappointments inspired the “quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters” (Boston Globe). In detailed commentaries on the origins and evolution of all fifteen of his novels, the author explains how his ardent quest for “lost places in the heart” gave birth to Stay More, the fictional Ozarks town that provided his novels’ settings. This career-spanning and eclectic selection of nonfiction illuminates the expansive philosophical and intellectual foundations upon which the author built the delightful tales of his beloved “Stay Morons.” At times a dogged Captain Ahab, stalking the tantalizing and infuriating white whale of publishing success, at others an irrepressible Don Quixote of folk culture, Harington dramatizes both the challenges and the triumphs built into the very notion of a distinctively American literature. The Guestroom Novelist serves up a rich, eclectic portrait of the artist as a young, middle-aged, and fiercely funny old man, a testimony to the writer’s magnificent ability to transform the seemingly crude stuff of our material existence into enduring art.

Brian Walter is professor of English at St. Louis College of Pharmacy and the director of Stay More: The World of Donald Harington, and Farther Along: The World of Donald Harington, Part 2. He also appears as an “old coot” interviewer in the last chapter of Harington’s final novel, Enduring.