E. Lynn Harris, African American Author is dead at 54

Author E. Lynn Harris,

E. Lynn Harris, 54 year-old died Thursday night in Los Angeles, California. Harris wrote a series of novels that exposed readers to characters rarely depicted in literature: black, affluent gay men who were masculine, complex and, sometimes, tormented. Harris had said in the past he was hurt by criticism from some black gay men who felt he wasn’t portraying them accurately and others who thought he was telling too much.

Through his writing, Harris took a little of the pain away with his life and his books with topics that have traditionally been a lot of pain associated with homosexuality in the black community.

Harris was born in Flint, Michigan and raised, along with his three sisters, in Little Rock, Arkansas. He attended the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville where he was the school’s first black yearbook editor, the first black male Razorbacks cheerleader, and the president of his fraternity. He graduated with honors with a degree in journalism.

Harris sold computers for IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and AT&T for thirteen years while living in Dallas, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta. He finally quit his sales job to write his first novel, Invisible Life, and, failing to find a publisher, he published it himself in 1991 and sold it mostly at black-owned bookstores, beauty salons, and book clubs before he was "discovered" by Anchor Books. Anchor published Invisible Life as a trade paperback in 1994, and thus his career as an author officially began.

Harris’ works includes Invisible Life was followed by Just As I Am (1994), And This Too Shall Pass (1996), If This World Were Mine (1997), Abide with Me (1999), Not A Day Goes By (2000), Any Way the Wind Blows (2001), A Love of My Own (2002), I Say A Little Prayer (2006), Just Too Good To Be True (2008), and Basketball Jones (2009) all published by Doubleday.

All eleven of Harris’ novels have hit the New York Times bestseller list, and they have also appeared on the bestseller lists of the Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times.