LARRY HAUN, who turned 80 in May, grew up on the wind-blown Nebraska plains, in a balloon-framed wood house with no insulation, electricity, running water or central heating. His first “constructions” were a little house, a wagon and some shelves he made with orange crates and a curved-claw hammer.

Since then, Mr. Haun has spent a lifetime building houses — straw bales in Nebraska, adobe and cob in New Mexico, tract houses in Southern California — and teaching others to do so, in articles and books written in clear prose spiked with an anecdote or two, for Fine Homebuilding magazine and its publishing parent, the Taunton Press.

His methods, gleaned during a thrift-driven, Depression-era childhood and honed through decades of production building, can be summed up as a collection of elegant shortcuts, making him the E. B. White of carpenters.

After he “retired,” to a little 1950s clapboard in Coos Bay, Ore., Mr. Haun built houses for Habitat for Humanity, and wheelchair ramps and grab bars for poor people with special needs, or those who were in hospices. In his engaging memoir, “A Carpenter’s Life as Told by Houses,” published last month, the author, a former union journeyman carpenter and philosopher, wondered if his freezing childhood was the source of his restless energy, which until about six months ago, by all accounts, was nearly boundless.