Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction
- 1 Acts of Writing
- 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 1860–1870
- 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide
- 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide
- 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young
- 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension
- 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
- 8 The Athens of the South
- 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
- 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere
- 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
- 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man and Amy T. Matthews's End of the Night Girl
9 - Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 April 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Adelaide as Literary City: Introduction
- 1 Acts of Writing
- 2 A Colonial Wordsmith: George Isaacs in Adelaide, 1860–1870
- 3 Scots and Scottish Literature in Literary Adelaide
- 4 ‘An entertaining young genius’: C.J. Dennis and Adelaide
- 5 Adelaide Around 1935: Stories of Herself When Young
- 6 Adelaide and the Country: the Literary Dimension
- 7 ‘Fearful Affinity’: Jindyworobak Primitivism
- 8 The Athens of the South
- 9 Max Harris: a Phenomenal Adelaide Literary Figure
- 10 Geoffrey Dutton: Little Adelaide and New York Nowhere
- 11 A Coffee With Ken: Ken Bolton's Adelaide
- 12 ‘A Dozy City’: Adelaide in J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man and Amy T. Matthews's End of the Night Girl
Summary
Max Harris was an exceptional and charismatic presence both in Adelaide and beyond. His significant contribution to Australian literature included founding and co-editing several literary journals, publishing his own poetry, enthusiastically encouraging other peoples' writings, contributing in several publishing ventures, initiating bookselling strategies, warring with the publishing world, prolific journalism, and persistent confrontation with a traditionalist establishment. This chapter seeks to emphasise the significance of his long and energetic involvement in the literary life of the city and the nation.
Maxwell Henley Harris was born at Henley Beach, an Adelaide suburb, in 1921. His childhood was spent in Mount Gambier in the southeast of South Australia and in that small town he gained his greatest formative influences. His imagination was filled with a profusion of local myths and he was later instrumental in directing Melbourne artists Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker towards their own consciousness of an environmental mythology.
Harris won a three-year boarding scholarship to the prestigious boys' private school, St Peter's College in Adelaide, where his first English teacher was John Padman, a critical influence. Padman recognised Harris's literary talent and took him under his wing, introducing him to modern British, US and European literature. Harris read and absorbed the work of writers such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, Henry Miller, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas and Virginia Woolf.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- AdelaideA Literary City, pp. 163 - 182Publisher: The University of Adelaide PressPrint publication year: 2013