Bertha Anne Harris (December 17, 1937 – May 22, 2005) was an American novelist. She is highly regarded by critics and admirers, but her novels are less familiar to the broader public.
Personal life
Bertha Anne Harris was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina on December 17, 1937 to John Holmes Harris and Mary Zeleka Jones.
In 1959, Harris graduated from the Women's College of University of North Carolina. Upon graduation, she moved to New York City at age twenty-two, spending her summers in Westport, Massachusetts. She stated that she wanted to live in New York "to find lesbians", but, ended up in a brief heterosexual marriage and had a daughter, Jennifer Harris Wyland. To support herself and her daughter, she worked as an editor and proofreader for a time, before returning to North Carolina to receive her M.F.A.
She died at age 67, on May 22, 2005, in New York City. She was later the director of Women's Studies and a Professor of Performing and Creative Arts at the College of Staten Island CUNY.
Harris has said that she is obsessed by two things: music (particularly opera) and the South. These two obsessions define her second novel, Confessions of Cherubino, published in 1972. However, she is most well known for her stylistically bold third novel, Lover, published in 1976. Lover was brought out by the Vermont-based independent publisher Daughters, Inc., a small publisher of women's fiction. She says she wrote it "straight from the libido, while I was madly in love, and liberated by the lesbian cultural movement of the mid-1970s."
Selected works
- Catching Saradove (1969)
- Confessions of Cherubino (1972)
- Lover (1976)
Further reading
- "Bertha Harris Papers, 1969" at J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte.