George Washington Harris - Influence and Legacy

Influence and Legacy

Authors Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor all acknowledged inspiration from George Washington Harris's work. In 1867, Mark Twain wrote a review of Sut Lovingood's Yarns for a San Francisco newspaper in which he suggested the book would "sell well in the west, but the eastern people will call it course and possibly taboo it." Faulkner read the Sut Lovingood yarns with "amused appreciation," and O'Connor ranked him among the top American "grotesque" writers. In the Cormac McCarthy novel, Suttree (which is set in Knoxville), the book's title character is called "Sut" for short, which some writers suggest is a reference to Sut Lovingood.

The mid-20th century brought revived interest in Harris's work. Literary historians compiled biographical materials regarding Harris's life, and scoured old newspapers to find and catalog Harris's work. In 1967, Thomas Inge published a collection of Harris's known works that did not appear in Sut Lovingood's Yarns in 1867. The book was entitled, High Times and Hard Times, after Harris's lost manuscript.

In 2008, George Washington Harris's final resting place was discovered in Brock Cemetery, Trenton, Georgia. The literary/detective team was a group of scholars and writers from several states including Calhoun Community College faculty members located in Decatur, Alabama; a local historian from Decatur,; and a writer based in Georgia. On April 20, 2008, a monument in his honor was erected at his burial site by Sigma Kappa Delta, an honor society for students at two-year colleges.