Harris was born Mark Harris Finklestein in Mount Vernon, New York to Carlyle and Ruth Klausner Finkelstein. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1943 and was out by 1944 due to an honorable discharge after suffering from sustained severe anxiety.
Reporter
Harris worked as a journalist in New York City at The Daily Item in 1944 and worked for PM in 1945. He worked in St. Louis at the International News Service 1945-1946. He also worked in Chicago at Negro Digest and Ebony 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 2001.
Writing career
His first novel, Trumpet to the World, the story of a young black soldier married to a white woman who is put on trial for striking back at a white officer, was published in 1946, and he continued to produce novels and contribute to periodicals through the years. In 1960, while in his first college teaching position, at San Francisco State College, Harris promoted his then-most-recent book in a TV appearance as guest contestant in "You Bet Your Life", the game played on The Groucho Show.
In the first chapter of his 1961 classic The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne C. Booth quotes the "fine young novelist" Harris as saying "You will no more expect the novelist to tell you precisely how something is said than you will expect him to stand by your chair and hold your book".
His last works dealt humorously with the ambitions of a would-be novelist (The Tale Maker) and to a lesser extent with Hitler's preoccupation with the recovery from Vienna of the talismanic spear supposed to have been used on the body of the dying Christ (The Spear of Destiny).
In 1996 Something about a Soldier was adapted to the stage by Ernest Kinoy and produced by the Theater Guild. Later, the movie and novel of Bang the Drum Slowly was adapted in 1992 into a stage play at the Next Theatre in Evanston, Illinois.
His nephew (the son of Harris's sister Martha Finkelstein) is the writer Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood.[1]
Harris died of complications of Alzheimer's disease at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital at age 84. He was survived by his wife, Josephine Horen; his sister, Martha; two sons, one daughter, and three grandchildren.
Career
Harris was 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 For Ever (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 as Wiggen and Robert De Niro as Pearson.
