A novelist, playwright, and English professor at San Francisco State, Purdue, and Arizona State, Harris is known among baseball fans for his series of novels about Dizzy Dean-esque flake Henry Wiggen: The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1959), and It Looked Like Forever (1979). Harris also did the screenplay for the Robert De Niro film of Bang the Drum Slowly, considered by many critics to be among the best baseball movies ever
