“A Born Writer”: Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful World, 1887-1967

Juanita Harrison escaped the harrowing Jim Crow South of her girlhood to become a world traveler and the most widely selling African American author of the mid twentieth century, all the while supporting herself as a domestic servant. “A Born Writer”: Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful World, 1887-1967--to date the first biography of Harrison—shows how she did it. It follows her from her birth in Mississippi to her death in Honolulu, along the way making stops in Denver, Los Angeles, Havana, Paris, Copenhagen, Kobe, Buenos Aires, and many other cities and nations as she circled the globe.

The first part of the study's title is taken from a statement in which Harrison quotes her editor: “She said I was a born writer. I thought about how far I had come from what I was born.” Harrison’s fame stemmed from her incongruity: that a seemingly ordinary Black woman effected such extraordinary travels, and that in their course displayed such unexpected writing talent. "A Born Writer" plumbs her complex subjectivity—as woman, worker, writer, tourist, expatriate, westerner, American, African American—and the rich texture of a lifetime devoted to international travel and cross-cultural encounter.

Recovering Harrison’s text and experience closes a gap in American literary history and helps redress the critical and archival neglect of working-class African American women, whose voices and lives have long been marginalized in U.S. scholarship.