Mark Harris (author)

Mark Harris
born Mark Harris Finkelstein

• Schools University of Denver, University of Minnesota

• Born November 19, 1922 in Mount Vernon, NY USA
• Died May 30, 2007 in Santa Barbara, CA USA

Biographical Information

Mark Harris was the author of four baseball novels and one collection of baseball essays in addition to 13 other books, fiction and nonfiction. Harris's most notable work was Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), which was later turned into a movie starring Robert DeNiro. It was the second of his four baseball novels, following The Southpaw, (1953), and before A Ticket for Seamstitch (1957) and It Looked Like For Ever, (1979). The books follow the adventures of Henry Wiggen, a gifted pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. Wiggen himself narrates the tales in a colloquial voice laced with dry, country humor. All the books grapple with moral and social issues. His collection of baseball essays, entitled Diamond, came out in 1994.

Harris was an advocate of realism in sports novels. He taught at English departments in at least six different colleges and was a professor at Arizona State University from 1980-2001. He died in 2007 of complications from Alzheimer's Disease.

Source: Obituary by Dennis McLellan in the Los Angeles Times (as picked up by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Related Sites

• New York Times obituary