Harris, Mark 1922-2007 (Jack Atkins, Willis J. Ingram, Henry Martha, Alex Washington, Jack R. Wright)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born November 19, 1922, in Mount Vernon, NY; died of complications from Alzheimer's disease, May 30, 2007, in Santa Barbara, CA. Educator and author. Harris was best known for his baseball novels featuring the character Henry Wiggen, including Bang the Drum Slowly. After serving with the U.S. Army during World War II, he pursued journalism with various New York newspapers. He changed his last name from Finkelstein to Harris in 1946 after being advised he would have a better chance of selling stories if he did not have a Jewish name. Harris was a writer for Ebony and Negro Digest in the late 1940s while pursuing his education. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Denver in 1950 and 1951, followed by a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1956. Harris taught at the University of Minnesota while studying for his doctorate. He then was a faculty member at what is now San Francisco State University for fourteen years.

During the 1960s and 1970s, he taught at a succession of educational institutions, including Purdue, the California Institute of the Arts, Immaculate Heart College, the University of Southern California, and the University of Pittsburgh. He finally settled at Arizona State University, where he was professor of English from 1980 until his 1994 retirement. As a writer, Harris was concerned with such issues as racism, social justice, and other moral dilemmas. These themes persist in his Wiggen books, even as they are flavored by humor and his realistic portrayal of the world of professional baseball. The Wiggen character is a pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths, and the four books in the series have been critically praised. They include The Southpaw, by Henry W. Wiggen: Punctuation Freely Inserted and Spelling Greatly Improved by Mark Harris (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly, by Henry W. Wiggen: Certain of His Enthusiasms Restrained by Mark Harris (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstich, by Henry W. Wiggen: But Polished for the Printer by Mark Harris (1957), and It Looked Like For Ever (1979). The second book, which is also the most acclaimed, was adapted for television on the U.S. Steel Hour in 1956, performed as a play in 1992, and turned into a movie starring Robert De Niro in 1973. It has been called one of the top sports books ever written. Besides these books, Harris was a prolific novelist and nonfiction author. Among his other fiction works are Trumpet to the World (1946), The Goy (1970), Lying in Bed (1984), and The Self-Made Brain Surgeon, and Other Stories (1999). He was also the author of the biography Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck (1980) and several autobiographies.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Harris, Mark, Mark the Glove Boy; or, The Last Days of Richard Nixon, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1964.

Harris, Mark, Twenty-one Twice: A Journal, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1966.

Harris, Mark, Best Father Ever Invented: The Autobiography of Mark Harris, Dial Press (New York, NY), 1976.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, June 2, 2007, Section 2, p. 6.

Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2007, p. B7.

New York Times, June 2, 2007, p. B10; June 7, 2007, p. A2.