- Harris, Mark
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▪ 2008Mark Harris FinkelsteinAmerican novelistborn Nov. 19, 1922, Mount Vernon, N.Y.died May 30, 2007, Santa Barbara, Calif.was the author of the baseball tetralogy that chronicled the adventures of Henry Wiggen, a talented pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths baseball team; the second novel in the series, Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), was hailed as one of the 100 greatest sports novels of all time. The story line focused on Wiggen's encouraging his teammates to embrace the team's terminally ill catcher, who is inspired by Wiggen to improve his game despite his illness. The book was adapted in 1956 as a television play with Paul Newman and Albert Salmi and made into a film starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro. The other books in Harris's tetralogy were The Southpaw (1953), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), and It Looked like Forever (1979). After earning a B.A. (1950) and an M.A. (1951) in English from the University of Denver, Harris received a Ph.D. (1956) in American studies from the University of Minnesota. He taught at five universities and spent his last years (1980–2001) on the faculty of Arizona State University. He also wrote a few nonfiction books, and his baseball essays were collected in Diamond (1994).
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Universalium. 2010.
