R.I.P. Donald and E. Lynn

I am the database jockey for a medium sized library. My title is Technical Services Supervisor, and my tasks are legion, but one of my primary jobs is to attend to the library’s catalog. A library catalog is a giant relational database that connects information about authors, books, and ultimately people like you and me who use the library.

In this role of database jockey, every year I have the gruesome honor of tallying up all the dead authors and entering their death dates into our catalog.

You have probably seen this before when you search for an author. You search for “Hemingway, Ernest,” and the catalog returns “Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-1961.” Well, when Ernest was alive the entry would be “Hemingway, Ernest, 1899-” A person just like me entered that 1961 sometime after Hemingway’s death.

Not every author gets a date. In general only authors for whom there is a conflict receive a date. So, if there are two Hemingway, Ernest’s out there the dates distinguish between the two. This rule doesn’t always seem to apply, however.

This week I’ve been stamping out the dead. Making sure that those who need it get the death date. It was a big year for literary dead, though, imho, the only real luminary to die this year was John Updike. Nevertheless, many lesser lights were extinguished.

Among those lesser lights, two were connected to the great state of Arkansas, where I call home. Donald Harington and E. Lynn Harris.

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To say that Harington was “connected” to Arkansas is an understatement. Harrington was born in Little Rock, went to college at the University of Arkansas, taught at the same for years prior to retirement, and, perhaps most significantly, he mined his experience of the state for the material of Stay More, Arkansas.

Stay More, a place as vivid as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, formed the setting for each of Harington’s 15 novels. Harington takes the raw stuff of life in the Ozarks and twists it into literary fiction. In an interview with Edwin Arnold Harington says:

The hillbilly is already a creature of myth.
Alas, then, I also am not a hillbilly. I am too educated to be a hillbilly. Like the lawyer who gives up his career to write crime novels or the doctor who gives up practicing in order to write medical novels, I forfeit my hillbilliness in order to write novels about hillbillies. It is some consolation that certain characteristics of hillbillies – fierce independence, shyness coupled with loquacity, a wry if not sardonic sense of humor – remain in my bloodstream, remain in my genes, and permit me never to forget what it is like being a hillbilly, at the same time that the deprive me of complete objectivity about hillbillies. I can’t laugh at hillbillies because I am still laughing too hard with them.

Harington never achieved commercial success, despite the fact that each of his books was met with critical praise. Maybe, he will undergo that transformation that death sometimes brings an artist, but until then he remains one of the greatest writers no one’s reading.

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E.Lynn Harris, by contrast, was no stranger to commercial success. He was a NY Times Bestselling author ten times running. His books garnered millions. But Harris was not a pulp writer or a literary profiteer. No, he had a story to tell.

Harris’s novels all deal with handsome African-American men on the down low, fellas who are struggling to come to terms with their sexuality, their masculinity, their identity. Harris took up this theme well before it was popular, and he did a damn good job writing convincing romance stories on a topic that still makes people squirm.

I’m prone to like Harris, though I’m not a huge fan. Like me, he was born in the dirty ol’ town of Flint, MI and like me he is a transplant to Arkansas. I’ll miss knowing he’s out there keepin’ it real on the down low.

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Fare thee well E Lynn. See ya on down the road Don.
Harington, Donald 1935-2009.
Harris, E. Lynn 1957-2009.