Did You Know This Author Was From Mississippi?

“The Silence of the Lambs” by Thomas Harris. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Mississippi has a long history of producing some of the greatest literary and commercially successful writers. Consider William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, John Grisham, and Greg Iles; and then add Thomas Harris, author of “The Silence of the Lambs,” to the list.

Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee in 1940, but grew up in Rich, Mississippi—near Clarksdale—where his father moved the family to take up farming. Harris was a quiet kid who read everything he could get his hands on. His mother said, “’he is the most gentle person I have ever known’” in a rare interview with the author and his mother in New York magazine in 1991. So how did such a gentle man come to write such a brilliant blend of crime suspense and horror fiction?

Harris majored in English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas where his uncle was a physician. While in Waco, Harris worked night shifts at the Waco News, often covering gruesome crime stories. His colleagues noted his relentless pursuit of every angle to get the story right. Friends and colleagues also saw Harris’s undeniable talent in writing short fictional pieces for magazine publication. Upon graduation, Harris took another night shift at the AP office in New York where he also covered copious crime stories, but this time Harris and two friends/fellow reporters came up with an idea for a novel based on a true story. Putnam bought the story and the friends split the advance three ways. Eventually, Harris quit his job to turn the story into the novel, “Black Sunday,” which was released in 1975.

It’s 1981: Enter Harris’s disturbing Hannibal Lecter in “Red Dragon,” which was published with moderate success. Hannibal takes center stage in “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1988 as the book hit the national best seller list. The success of “Silence of the Lambs” only grew as the blockbuster film starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodi Foster won an historic five Oscars. (As a further honor, the film has since been preserved in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.) Harris received a five-million dollar advance for his next two books, “Hannibal” and “Hannibal Rising.”

Collecting Thomas Harris’s books is no easy task. Over the years, the shy author would rather be cooking gourmet meals or writing than giving interviews or book talks. His publishers have never issued any special signed limited editions, and the few signed books mostly come from random circumstances.

See all of Lemuria’s first editions by Thomas Harris here. 

Written by Lisa Newman,  A version of this column was published in The Clarion-Ledger’s Sunday Mississippi Books page.