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During World War II, real news is a rare commodity in the hamlet of Stay More, Arkansas. But twelve-year-old Dawny--inspired by his hero Ernie Pyle--finds enough local color to keep the townsfolk reading his weekly newspaper, The Stay Morning Star. Dawny reports on the war between the Allies and the Axis, two roving bands of boys and girls fighting with sticks and spears, and competing in scrap drives and verbal jousts. But the tenor of these games changes as developments bring the world's war closer to home: the crackle of the town's first radio delivers frightening news from the outside world to the isolated village, and a native son dies on Iwo Jima. For the first time ever, an airplane darkens the skies over Stay More, and soldiers occupy the remote hills in training for an invasion of Japan. As the ways of outsiders creep into the small town's routines, the texture of rural life is irrevocably changed.

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 storytellers. 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).