Choiring Of The Trees [Hardcover]

Donald Harington (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 8, 1991

A young mountaineer is sentenced to the electric chair in 1914 Arkansas because of the testimony of a thirteen-year-old-girl who was raped in the backwoods of the Ozarks. Nail Chism appears doomed to death-until his innocence is championed by the staff artist of the state's leading newspaper. "A superbly rewarding novel" (Christian Science Monitor). Harvest American Writing series

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As Nail Chism is led to the electric chair for the first time, he thinks he hears the trees singing in Stay More, his Ozarks hometown, a setting that Harington has used lovingly in his previous novels. But this book is a far cry from the larky irony of the anthropomorphic characters of The Cockroaches of Stay More . This is an intense, lyrical, moving story--based on fact--of an unjustly convicted criminal and the woman who saved his life. Harington makes of it a dramatic, engrossing narrative with the melodramatic pace of a cliffhanger, the tenderness of a pastoral romance, and the power of documentary-like descriptions of brutal prison conditions in Arkansas in the early 1900s. Falsely charged and convicted of raping a teenage girl, Chism is (temporarily) saved by a last-minute stay of execution. By that time, Viridis Monday, a newspaper artist covering the event, is convinced that he is innocent and begins a valiant campaign to gain his freedom. As usual, Harington renders his backwoods characters without patronizing or sentimentality, and he writes with sensitivity of the Ozarks life and landscape. Although sometimes the conceit of the singing trees becomes cloying, this is a significant novel that should please a wide audience.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Another in Harington's series of novels about Stay More, Arkansas, this book (based on actual events) depicts unsophisticated residents of the Ozarks as well as bohemian artists in Paris during the early days of Fauvism. When Nail Chism refuses to cooperate with corrupt local politicians, he is framed for rape and sentenced to death. Viridis Monday, a Paris-trained artist, is assigned to sketch his execution for a Little Rock newspaper. Convinced of Nail's innocence, she mounts a campaign to exonerate him. A skilled storyteller, Harington displays the brutality of prison life in 1914 as well as the tender love between Nail and Viridis. Although a few coincidences of plot are not entirely credible, the novel remains convincing and engaging.
- Albert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technological Univ., Cookeville
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 388 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1st edition (April 8, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151175500
• ISBN-13: 978-0151175505
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #147,338 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Donald Harington was one of America's greatest writers of fiction. His fifteen novels have been called jubilant, lyrical, foxy, captivating, delicate, bawdy, playful, reckless, joyful, courageous. Set in the fictional hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas, Harington's stories blend myth, dreamscape and sharply observed speech and manners to depict a rich, eccentric, rural society. All fifteen novels--from the classic Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, to the redemptive Choiring of the Trees, the love story With and the concluding novel Enduring, published just two months before Mr. Harington's death-- are now available as The Complete Novels of Donald Harington, a must-have collection for all those who wish to read the very best, authentic, contemporary American writing.

"The quirkiest, most original body of work in contemporary US letters." -Boston Globe

"Harington is hooked into the deepest traditions of storytelling, dipping his buckets directly into the well it all comes from, pursuing a literature dedicated not to documentation or self-expression, but to fascination, to lifting us out of ourselves and the dailiness of our lives -- to making our world again wondrous and large." --Los Angeles Times

"Totally satisfying... Harington reveres the most ordinary aspects of the lives of unexceptional people...he makes his joy infectious." --Time Magazine

Donald Harington (1935 -2009) was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent nearly all of his childhood 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 dialect and the old tales told by local storytellers. He published his first novel in 1965, and fourteen more for a total of fifteen, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, loosely based on Drakes Creek. Acclaimed by critics as "an undiscovered continent," "America's Chaucer," and "one of the most powerful, subtle and inventive novelists in America," Harington was the recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Oxford American Lifetime Achievement Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy as Breathing, January 28, 2005

By 

D. L. Major (Richmond, VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Choiring Of The Trees (Paperback)

This may be the most intimate, for me, of Harington's novels. TAOTAO was the first, and is the spine of all my Harington reading - but this one is easily the one my *girlish* heart loved most. It is the best balance of Harington's wild fancy and his talent for character development, and it is the book that feels like he must have had the same breezes in his fingers that live in Nail's trees. Merely seeing this title makes little hairs on my neck stand up a bit, this story is so affecting.

I want to go read it once more, and cry and smile as it carries me again.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Top Read of 2002, April 19, 2003

By 

Richard Freethey "oldson" (Bowie, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Choiring Of The Trees (Paperback)

I read 75-80 novels a year and this was hands down the best read of 2002. Moving, thought provoking, a wonderful historical characterization of a time and era, absolutely vivid characters, and surprises throughout. I always choose a top read of the year and this is the second time Mr Harington has topped the list for me. Not many novels make you feel you're there; this one does.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My very favorite novel, April 14, 2008

By 

D. Chaudoir (Michigan and Arkansas, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Choiring Of The Trees (Stay More) (Paperback)

I have so much to say about this novel; however, you should not be reading this review. Your time is much better spent reading this book and introducing yourself to the world of Stay More, Arkansas.

It is one of the most unforgettable books of all time, and the story will stay with you forever.

Harington is indeed one of our very best writers.