I’ve been a little disappointed in his last few books, but the first name that comes to mind is Donald Harington. His books have sold well enough that the last several have stayed in print since publication, but not well enough for him to become any kind of sensation. The best of the novels is probably The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, the story of a century and a half in the life of the barely fictional hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas, as reflected in its buildings. Stay More is Harington’s Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional but precisely located place where nearly all of Harington’s books are at least partially set. Having lived within ten miles of Stay More’s putative location, I can vouch for the accuracy of Harington’s portrait of both the people and places of Newton County, Arkansas. But that’s not really the point. Harington uses the specifics of the Ozarks to deal with universals, sometimes more successfully than others.
The real gem among Harington’s works is a non-fiction book that’s utterly unclassifiable otherwise. Let Us Build Us A City: Eleven Lost Towns explores the history of elevent towns scattered all over Arkansas that have the word “City” in their names, and which are now anything but cities. It’s about the hopes, dreams, and ambitions of the people of these towns (sometimes grandiose, sometimes extremely modest). Several years before Let Us Build Us A City, Harington had written a novel called Some Other Place, The Right Place, in which a couple explores ghost towns (literally, as the girl’s grandfather’s ghost occupies some of them). LUBUAC opens with Harington’s description of receiving a letter from a woman in his home state of Arkansas, a schoolteacher, who has read and loved Some Other Place and proposes to emulate its characters by traveling around the state exploring some of its “lost towns”. With his long-distance guidance (he’s lecturing at a university in Montana at the time), she does so, filling him in by letter on her experiences. He provides details from his own researches. The book plays out as an astonishing love story in its own right, while treating such nearly forgotten historical episodes as the wreck of the steamboat Sultana (with a loss of life rivalled only by the Titanic), forgotten folk legends like Peter Mankins, and of course, forgotten places. There’s an enormous amount of historical information in this book, but it’s the sort you don’t find much of elsewhere: what the lives and deaths of very ordinary people in very ordinary places were like, and what the effect of the occasional extraordinary people or events on them is.
Among the other novels, particular mention should be made of The Cockroaches of Stay More, a pastiche of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, told as the history of Stay More’s insect inhabitants.
Harington’s trademark stylistic conceit is that the last chapter of each novel is in the future tense; he claims to hate endings, and avoids them in this way. Each novel tends to have some identifiable literary ancestor (Tess for Cockroaches, One Hundred Years of Solitude for Architecture, Lolita for Ekaterina, etc.); in the more successful novels this deepens and enriches the experience, in the less successful ones it just seems clever for its own sake.
There’s a long and detailed appreciation of Harington’s work by Steve Reed at http://home.earthlink.net/~jsr007/DHarticle.html .