Mark Harris (author)

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This article is about the author. For the 19th-century political figure, see Mark Harris (politician)

Mark Harris (born November 19, 1922) is an American novelist, literary biographer, and educator.

1 Life and career
2 Selected works
3 External links

[edit] Life and career

Harris is best known for a quartet of novels about baseball players: The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), and It Looked Like Forever (1979). Written in the vernacular, the books are the account of Henry "Author" Wiggen, a pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. In 1956 Bang the Drum Slowly was adapted for an installment of the dramatic television anthology series The United States Steel Hour; the production starred Paul Newman as Wiggen and Albert Salmi as doomed catcher Bruce Pearson. The novel also became a major motion picture in 1973, with a screenplay written by Harris, directed by John D. Hancock and featuring Michael Moriarty and Robert DeNiro.

Harris was born in Mount Vernon, New York. After serving in the Armed Forces during World War II, Harris worked as a journalist in New York City, St. Louis, and Chicago before enrolling at the University of Denver, from which he received a Master's degree in 1951. He obtained a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1956 and went on to teach at several universities, eventually settling at Arizona State, where he was a professor of English and taught in the creative writing program from 1980 to 2002.

His first novel, Trumpet to the World, was published in 1946, and he has continued to produce novels and contribute to periodicals through the years.