Henry Sydnor Harrison

Biography

Henry Sydnor Harrison entered the world in 1880 on the bluff-top campus of Sewanee, Tennessee, where his father taught dead languages to the living and practiced medicine on the side. Five years later the household resettled in Brooklyn after Dr. Harrison founded the Brooklyn Latin School, a private academy run with classical rigor and paternal authority. At Columbia University the son traded declensions for deadlines, steering the campus paper and treading the boards for the Columbia Dramatic Society before collecting his degree in 1900. The elder Harrison’s death in 1902 scattered the family southward to Richmond, Virginia. Henry tried the reporter’s beat, discovered it chafed, and fled within months to Charleston, West Virginia, where he barricaded himself with ink and paper. Half a year later he emerged with Queed; the 1911 novel caught on like warm gossip, and its 1913 successor, V.V.’s Eyes, kept the momentum alive—together the two books raced past 400,000 copies. Suddenly every magazine that had spurned his short fiction clamored to print it, and Harrison obliged, feeding an audience that adored him even while critics—most memorably H. L. Mencken—dismissed him as a “merchant of mush.” In the summer of 1930 he checked into an Atlantic City hospital for what was expected to be a routine operation; four days later he was gone, leaving behind a shelf of stories, a trail of loyal readers, and no wife.