Mark Harris

He was soon arrested and then hospitalized for psychoneurosis. Read Less

In January 1962, Something About a Soldier, a stage version of Harris's novel, played briefly on Broadway. Written by Ernest Kinoy and produced by the Theatre Guild, it featured Sal Mineo in the lead role. Later, the movie and novel of Bang the Drum Slowly was adapted in 1992 into a stage play at the Next Theatre in Evanston, Illinois.

His nephew (the son of Harris's sister Martha Finkelstein) is the writer Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, author of the memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free: A Memoir of a Political Childhood. http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/03/31/family_memoirs/index.html

Harris died of complications of Alzheimer's disease at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital at age 84. He was survived by his wife, Josephine Horen; his sister, Martha; two sons, one daughter, and three grandchildren.

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). Written in the vernacular, the books are the account of Henry "Author" Wiggen, a pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. 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. Read Less