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7 “A Woman Who Writes Is Born to Trouble” Corra Harris often reflected on the difficulties of a writing career. “It is easier to be a Christian,” she wrote in 1933, “than to become a successful writer.”1 When fledgling writers asked for advice on how to get started, she tried to convince them that “literary composition is harder work than . . . sweatshop slavery.”2 Elsewhere she had written a similar sentiment to her daughter , who was still adjusting to the rigors of a writing career: “You have my prayers and sympathy this coming week . . . with your work. I hope it will go, but if it does it will be the first time in the literary history of the family that work ever took up its bed and walked off without a deadly struggle with the author.”3 A writing career was hard work, and for women it was even worse. “Now for your daughter,” George Lorimer wrote. “She’s younger than the rest of us, and hasn’t had her share of literary disappointments yet, so we’d better train her to a knowledge that a woman who writes is born to trouble.”4 Indeed, Harris’s life as a writer was filled with plenty of trouble. But in the balance, it was filled with more satisfaction and reward. Harris had a diverse lot of admirers in the general reading public. One reader wrote that he found in her novels “flashes of genius as good as any writing I have seen outside of Shakespere [sic].” Many letters of praise came from people in the business and professional classes. One male physician from Los Angeles considered her novel The Recording Angel the best literature to appear “since David Copperfield and Vanity Fair.” A woman doctor from California believed Harris’s second autobiography revealed her ability to portray “human frailties” with exceptional dignity and grace.5 An economics professor called her “the sanest-minded, finest witted, truest writer of the times.”6 And Milton White, an English professor from Jackson, Mississippi , wrote that he believed “future years . . . will rather increase your fame than diminish it. I believe no American author has seen more into human character.”7 Although White’s opinions proved wrong, his letter no doubt heartened Harris, as it came in 1933, a year in which she faced repeated rejections to publish her works nationally.8 130 / Chapter 7 Bankers made up some of Harris’s most earnest admirers. The president of the United States Savings Bank in Washington, D.C., wrote that he had “had the great pleasure of reading your various articles in the magazines from time to time.” He was especially amused by The Circuit Rider’s Widow (one of two sequels to follow A Circuit Rider’s Wife), which was “so accurate and real that I laughed until the tears came to my eyes.” More seriously moved by her philosophy than amused by her humor, the president of the Federal Land Bank of Houston, Texas, wrote: “In the warp and woof of the fabric of modern life your quaint philosophy, religious and social, so happily expressed runs like a thread of gold for all those whose privilege it is to follow your pen.”9 The bankers Harris heard from were men. After a fairly long but lighthearted letter to Harris reminding her of her “marriage” to the Saturday Evening Post, George Lorimer asked, “Why is it that your writing makes strong men burst into song?”10 It was obviously a rhetorical question . Lorimer, known for his ability to gauge American popular opinion, knew well why men responded to writing that glorified traditional gender roles.11 Many readers believed Harris had exceptional insight into the human heart.12 One of her most abiding admirers, editor Hamilton Holt, said so more than once. At a memorial ceremony honoring Harris a year after her death, Holt reflected on words he had published the previous decade in a review of My Book and Heart: “I have never met a soul in my life who could tell you so many true things about yourself that you never even suspected before, and yet you instantly recognized as so. To be sure, she was occasionally wrong, [but] . . . [h]er bull’s eyes . . . far outnumbered her misses.”13 Harris knew well her reputation for being a bad speller and grammarian and for having no regard for factual accuracy. Her daughter lectured her constantly about all three shortcomings, and her friend Bettie Rains gave up...

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