Mark Harris (author)

Mark Harris (November 19, 1922 – May 30, 2007) was an American novelist, literary biographer, and educator, remembered for his baseball novels featuring Henry Wiggen, particularly Bang the Drum Slowly.

[2] After graduating in 1940 from Mount Vernon High School, he dropped his surname because "it was a difficult time for kids with Jewish names to get jobs.

"[3] He subsequently went to work for Paul Winkler's Press Alliance news agency in New York City as a messenger and mimeograph operator.

His growing opposition to war and his anger at the prevalence of racial discrimination in the Army led him to go AWOL from Camp Wheeler, Georgia, in February 1944.

In September 1980, he joined the faculty of Arizona State University, where he was a professor of English and taught in the creative writing program until his retirement in 2001.

[6] 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).

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.

He has also written three autobiographical books: Mark the Glove Boy, or The Last Days of Richard Nixon (1964), an account of Nixon's unsuccessful California gubernatorial campaign; Twentyone Twice: A Journal (1966), an account of his experiences in Sierra Leone as a member of the Peace Corps; and, finally, Best Father Ever Invented (1976), subtitled "An Autobiography of Mark Harris," in which he chronicles his life from late adolescence up to 1973.

"[12] In The Denver Post, Roger K. Miller writes that "Bang the Drum Slowly, by Henry J. Wiggin: Certain of His Enthusiasms Restrained, to give it its full title, is even better than that other much-praised baseball novel, Bernard Malamud's The Natural, with its element of fantasy.