Harris Dickson
producer, writer
- Born:
- 1868-07-21, Yazoo City, Mississippi, USA
- Died:
- 1946-03-17, Vicksburg, Mississippi, USA
- Professions:
- producer, writer
Biography
Harris Dickson spent his weekdays in a Vicksburg, Mississippi courtroom—black robe, gavel, the hush of small-town justice—then slipped off that formality at dusk and wrote. Night after night, while crickets tuned up along the Mississippi River bluff, he conjured whole worlds for readers of Collier’s, Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post, and Century Magazine. His most durable creation was Old Reliable, a shrewd, quick-witted Black man navigating Reconstruction’s tangled years (1865-1876) in the same river town where Dickson himself had been raised. Readers first met Old Reliable in scattered magazine pages; later they bound the tales into books, and Hollywood eventually threaded the stories through reels of film, sending Vicksburg’s lore far beyond the levee.
