George Washington Harris (March 20, 1814 – December 11, 1869) was an American humorist best known for his character "Sut Lovingood," an Appalachian backwoods reveler fond of telling tall tales.

In 1819, Harris's half-brother, the younger Samuel Bell, completed an apprenticeship at an arms factory and moved to Knoxville to open a jewelry store.

Harris built a small model of the Atlas and dazzled an audience by sailing it across the so-called "Flag Pond" on the north side of town.

[3] Around 1840, he published his first political satires in the Knoxville Argus (later renamed the Standard), a Democratic-leaning newspaper edited by Elbridge Gerry Eastman (1813–1859), with whom Harris would form a lifelong partnership.

[3] Over the subsequent decade, he engaged in various enterprises, which included the founding of a glassworks and the cofounding of a sawmill, both of which apparently failed.

[3] These included his four-part story "Love-Feast of Varmints," which lampooned the Opposition Party's March 1859 Nashville convention, and three Sut Lovingood tales in 1861 that attacked President Abraham Lincoln.

[3] After the war, Harris, with the help of future Chattanooga congressman William Crutchfield, was appointed president of the Wills Valley Railroad (which operated in Georgia and Alabama).

In late November 1869, he travelled from his new home in Alabama to Lynchburg, Virginia, to show his manuscript to a prospective publisher.

[5] The second involves a mountaineer who travels several miles to watch a quarter-race in south Knox County but misses the race due to drinking.

[6] The third epistle is a collection of anecdotes and observations, and mentions a 100-pound fish caught at Forks-of-the-River in east Knox County.

[7] The fourth epistle describes a country dance at "Tuck-a-lucky" (Tuckaleechee) Cove in south Blount County.

Knoxville historian Jack Neely describes Sut as "Huck Finn on amphetamines, a manic, perverse child of some backwoods holler where Idiocy and Genius fuse into one.

[12] He is fond of drinking whiskey and chasing girls, and relishes exposing hypocritical circuit riders and other religious figures and politicians.

[17] In 1861, Harris published his three-part attack on Abraham Lincoln entitled "Sut Lovingood Travels With Old Abe as His Confidential Friend and Advisor.

"[16] His first writings after the Civil War included "Sut Lovingood's Dream" and "On the Puritan Yankee," which defended Southern values.

[16] Authors Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor all acknowledged inspiration from George Washington Harris's work.

In 1867, Mark Twain wrote a review of Sut Lovingood's Yarns for a San Francisco newspaper in which he suggested the book would "sell well in the west, but the eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it.

"[18] Faulkner read the Sut Lovingood yarns with "amused appreciation,"[19] and O'Connor ranked him among the top American "grotesque" writers.