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Let Us Build Us A City: Eleven Lost Towns [Paperback]

DONALD HARINGTON (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)


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Product Details

  • Paperback
  • Publisher: Harcourt (1986)
  • ASIN: B000OJN52M
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)

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

8 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An American classic., May 23, 1998
In this odd mix of travelogue, Americana, love story and history, Donald Harington shows us not just lost cities and lost people and places, but what he calls "lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul". And the beautiful thing, the redemption, is that these places aren't lost. In Harington's elegant prose they live on, and will live on as long as this book is read. It deserves to be read in every American history class in the country, because in this book his remembrances and his curiosity open new worlds, just next to and behind this one. Towards the end, when he includes a poem by Richard Hugo, it's as if he's bottled something inside you that you felt but didn't know. A tremendous achievement of remembrance.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Treasure Found Off the Beaten Path, January 9, 2001
It gives me faith in the publishing industry to find this wonderful book still in print. Donald Harington was an established Arkansas novelist when a reader named Kim wrote him out of the blue expressing the inspiration she drew from one of his stories. Harington was lecturing out of state at the time but he responded with encouragement for a project looking into the history of Arkansas places that had "City" in the name and were anything but. So, Kim took off, doing the leg work and dispatching her findings to Harington who eventually shaped them into this symphony of historical fact and human tragedies and comedies. As soon has he was able, he caught up with Kim and the two became instant soul mates. Their own story is woven into this unique blend of fact and imaginative invocation of original intentions and relinquished dreams. A pleasure to read, it sparks curiosity about the cities that never grew up in your own state (the author includes a state by state list) and a desire to go learn their stories. This is a unique story, very human, very American.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A contemplative look at the joy and wonder to be discovered in hidden Arkansas history, August 17, 2008
Award-winning author Donald Harington originally published Let Us Build Us a City in 1986; now in a beautiful new edition, this thoughtful collection of stories about eleven forgotten small towns in Arkansas remains a pristine glimpse into history. Some of the forgotten towns gradually dwindled and declined to little more than a church, a post office, a general store, a gas station, and a handful of residents; other overlooked towns were never terribly memorable to begin with. Donald Harington learned of these towns' stories through his connection with a researcher named Kim, and eventually Harrington and Kim fell in love. Let Us Build a City is a contemplative look at the joy and wonder to be discovered in hidden Arkansas history, and as enjoyable to read today as it was over twenty years ago.
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Inside This Book (learn more)
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First Sentence:
IT IS NOT ON THE ROAD to anywhere. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
other lost cities, sunk lands, hog eye, chair factory
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Lake City, Bear City, Buffalo City, Cherokee City, Arkansas City, Garland City, Peter Mankins, Marble City, Sulphur City, Cave City, Henry Thane, Little Rock, Dallas Bump, United States, Clarence Jewell, Newton County, Civil War, Cotton Taft, White River, Doc Norris, Joe Weston, Wiley Rouse, Baxter Hurst, New York, Cotton Williams
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