Her formal education was limited to teacher training at nearby female academies, though she never graduated from any of the schools she attended.

Two were autobiographies, one a travel journal, and two became feature-length movies, the best known was I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, released in 1951 and inspired by, A Circuit Rider's Wife.

[4] Although she became famous for her fiction, Harris's reputation for reactionary conservatism lasted throughout her life and became part of her contradictory legacy.

After the lynching of Thomas Wilkes, alias Sam Hose, near Newnan, Georgia, William Hayes Ward, editor-in-chief at the Independent, published an editorial denouncing the act.

Wells) called "threadbare", namely to protect innocent white women from malevolent black men.

The last four years of her life, from 1931 to 1935, she published what critics have called some of her best writing in a tri-weekly "Candlelit Column" in the Atlanta Journal.

[7] Some critics have dismissed Harris's fiction as domestic or sentimental, but others find nuanced social and cultural critique in her works, especially of the South's gender and racial mores.