Harry Harrison (writer)
Harry Max Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey; March 12, 1925 – August 15, 2012)[2] was an American science fiction author, known mostly for his character The Stainless Steel Rat and for his novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966). The latter was the rough basis for the motion picture Soylent Green (1973). Long resident in both Ireland and the United Kingdom, Harrison was involved in the foundation of the Irish Science Fiction Association, and was, with Brian Aldiss, co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group.
Harry Harrison
Henry Maxwell Dempsey
March 12, 1925
Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.
August 15, 2012 (aged 87)
Brighton, England
Writer, illustrator
American, Irish
1951–2010
Inkpot Award (2004)[1]
Evelyn Harrison (div. 1951)
Joan Merkler Harrison (1954–2002, her death)
2
Aldiss called him "a constant peer and great family friend".[3] His friend Michael Carroll said of Harrison's work: "Imagine Pirates of the Caribbean or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and picture them as science-fiction novels. They're rip-roaring adventures, but they're stories with a lot of heart."[4] Novelist Christopher Priest wrote in an obituary
Personal life[edit]
Early life[edit]
Harrison was born March 12, 1925, as Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Stamford, Connecticut. His father, Henry Leo Dempsey, a printer who was three-fourths of Irish descent, changed his name to Harrison soon after Harry was born. Harry did not know this himself until he was 30 years old, at which point he changed his name to Harry Max Harrison in court.[20] His mother, Ria, née Kirjassoff,[21] was Russian Jewish. She had been born in Riga, Latvia, and grew up in Saint Petersburg, Russia.[22][23] Her brother, Max David Kirjassoff (1888–1923), had been an American consul in Japan, but he died along with his wife Alice during the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake in 1923.[24][25][26][27][28]
After finishing Forest Hills High School in 1943, Harrison was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II as a gunsight technician and as a gunnery instructor. Priest adds that he became a sharpshooter, a military policeman, and a specialist in the prototypes of computer-aided bomb-sights and gun turrets. "But overall the army experience vested in him a hatred of the military that was to serve him well as a writer later on."[5]
In 1946 he enrolled in Hunter College in New York City and later ran a studio selling illustrations to comics and science fiction magazines.[3]
Marriages[edit]
Harrison married Evelyn Harrison, whom he included in a cartoon he drew of the Hydra Club in 1950. They divorced in 1951,[29] and Evelyn married the science fiction writer Lester del Rey shortly afterwards.[30]
Harrison married Joan Merkler Harrison in 1954. Their marriage lasted until her death of cancer in 2002. They had two children, Todd (born in 1955) and Moira (born in 1959), to whom he dedicated his novel Make Room! Make Room![30]
Esperanto[edit]
In his middle years, Harrison became an advocate of Esperanto, saying he could "write and speak it with an automatic ease I have never been able to capture in any language other than my native English";[31] he learned it, according to Christopher Priest, out of boredom during military service. The language often appears in his novels, particularly in his Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld series.
He was the honorary president of the Esperanto Association of Ireland, where he had moved in the 1970s, living with his family for a number of years in a then-state-of-the-art home he built in the Vale of Avoca in County Wicklow. He also held memberships in other Esperanto organizations such as Esperanto-USA (formerly the "Esperanto League for North America"), of which he was an honorary member, and the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (World Esperanto Association), of whose Honorary Patrons' Committee he was a member.[32]
After many years of moving around and raising children, he spent most of his later years residing in Ireland. Because Harrison had an Irish grandparent, he was able to assume citizenship, and by taking advantage of the Irish tax exemption for artists, he enjoyed tax-free status.[5]
Harrison also kept an apartment in London for many years, and later in Brighton, these being used for his frequent visits to England, and when Joan died in 2002, his British home became permanent.
Harrison's official website, launched at the Irish national convention a few years earlier, announced his death on August 15, 2012,[33][2] at his apartment in Brighton, England.
On learning of his death on August 15, 2012, Harlan Ellison said, "It's a day without stars in it."[11]
