Clifford Stone—quixotic curator of arcane Americana
at a Boston antiques foundation and cataloguer of our “Vanished American Past”—forsakes Boston and
his icy wife to return to his hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, and a life that is both instantly familiar and disturbingly strange.
Cliff’s journey home begins as a recovery mission, but it becomes a desperate search for, confrontation
with, immersion in, and emergence from his lost past. In a series of libidinous, murderous, hilarious and anxious adventures, Cliff renews old friendships—including one with a girl he thought he’d forgotten—and makes some new enemies.
The Cherry Pit is a flamboyant, lascivious, comic novel about restoration and renewal—and, like all
proper comic novels, a serious book.
About the Author
 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).
Author Website
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The Critics Praise:
“Harington’s first novel, Cherry Pit (1965), tells of an Arkansas native who comes home to
Little Rock from Boston only to become entangled with his past. His name, tellingly, is Cliff (impermanence, peril) Stone (stability, invulnerability). Such are the final pages of the
novel that we’re never sure the whole narrative’s not been dream or lie.” - Boston Globe
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