Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns - Tapa blanda

This work brilliantly fuses travel narrative with history and cultural studies—yet reads like a novel. It’s also a love story that is in no way fictional. A fan letter to the author from a woman named Kim starts a correspondence which details research she’s conducting in one-horse towns throughout Arkansas.

In the years of rural decline many of these towns dwindled to church, post office, general store, gas station, and a few rundown houses—but every house has a porch, every porch a rocker, and every rocker an old man or woman with a story.

Kim and Don agree to collaborate on a book—this one—creating a unique and enchanting work about towns that will never again be their old selves and towns that never fulfilled the brave dreams of their founders. And at the end of the adventure the author and Kim meet, having learned something of expectation and hope—and love. With photos and maps.

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).