This Goodly Land

George Washington Harris (March 20, 1814–December 11, 1869)

Other Names Used

• Mr. Free: pen name
• Sugartail: pen name

Alabama Connections

• Decatur, Morgan County: brief adult residence

Selected Works

• Harris, George W. Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun By a "Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool" Warped and Wove for Public Wear. New York: Dick & Fitzgerald, 1867. Rpt. as Sut Lovingood Yarns. Memphis, Tenn.: St. Luke's Press, 1987. An online version of Sut Lovingood is available from Wright American Fiction 1851-1875.
• Harris, George Washington. Sut Lovingood Travels With Old Abe Lincoln. Chicago: The Black Cat Press, 1937.
• Harris, George Washington. Sut Lovingood. Ed. Brom Weber. New York: Grove Press, 1954.
• Harris, George Washington. Sut Lovingood's Yarns. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. New Haven, Conn.: College & University Press, 1966.
• Harris, George Washington. High Times and Hard Times: Sketches and Tales. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967.

Biographical Information

George Washington Harris was born in Allegheny City, Pa. (now part of Pittsburgh). When Harris was five, he moved to Knoxville, Tenn., to work in his stepbrother’s metalworking shop as an apprentice. At age nineteen, Harris became a steamboat captain. He left the steamboat business in 1839 and bought farmland in Blount County, Tenn. Harris also began writing for a friend’s newspaper, the Knoxville Argus. He was unable to make a financial success of his farm and returned to Knoxville and opened a metalworking shop. That same year, 1843, Harris began publishing short pieces in Spirit of the Times, a national sporting and humor newspaper. In 1849, Harris became the superintendent of a glass manufactory. Five years later, he briefly became a steamboat captain again before working as a surveying superintendent at the Ducktown copper mines in Polk County, Tenn. He returned to Knoxville the following year. In early 1846, Harris served as an alderman and began writing for the Nashville Union & American. In 1858, Harris tried but was unable to locate a publisher for a proposed book. He continued to publish his stories in the periodical press.

In 1859, Harris became a conductor on the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. He was a freight agent for that railroad from 1860 to 1861. After the Civil War broke out, Harris moved his family from Knoxville (a stronghold of Unionism) to Nashville. For the next four years, they moved frequently, living in Nashville, Chattanooga, Decatur, Ala., and Trenton, Ga. They returned to Nashville in 1866, where his stories continued to appear in the Union & American. In the spring of 1867, Harris published a collection of his Sut Lovingood stories. His sketches also began appearing in the Chattanooga Daily American Union. The following spring, he published some political satires in the Knoxville Press and Messenger. In October 1869, Harris remarried in Decatur, Ala. (his first wife had died two years earlier). Two months later, he traveled to Lynchburg, Va., to look for a publisher for a new book. On his trip home, he became ill, possibly from a stroke. He was taken off the train in Knoxville and died there. The book manuscript disappeared and was never recovered.

Interests and Themes

George Washington Harris’s frequently risqué stories are in the Old Southwest humor tradition.

For More Information

Please check your local library for these materials. If items are not available locally, your librarian can help you borrow them through the InterLibrary Loan program. Your librarian can also help you find other information about this author.

There may be more information available through the databases in the Alabama Virtual Library. If you are an Alabama citizen, AVL can be used at your public library or school library media center. You can also get a username and password from your librarian to use AVL at home.

Reference Books

• Caron, James E., and M. Thomas Inge, eds. Sut Lovingood's Nat'ral Born Yarnspinner: Essays on George Washington Harris. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996.
• Inge, M. Thomas, ed. The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975.
• McClary, Ben Harris, ed. The Lovingood Papers, 1963. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1963.
• McClary, Ben Harris, ed. The Lovingood Papers, 1964. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1964.
• Rickels, Milton. George Washington Harris. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966.

Reference Articles

• Current-Garcia, Eugene. "Sut Lovingood's Rare Ripe Southern Garden". Studies in Short Fiction 9. (1972): 117-129.
• Estes, David C. "Sut Lovingood at the Camp Meeting: A Practical Joker Among the Backwoods Believers". The Southern Quarterly: A Journal of the Arts in the South 25.2. (1987): 53-65.
• Gardiner, Elaine. "Sut Lovingood: Backwoods Existentialist". Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South 22.2. (1983): 177-189.
• Inge, M. Thomas. "Sut Lovingood: An Examination of the Nature of a 'Nat'ral Born Durn'd Fool'". Tennessee Historical Quarterly 19. (1960): 231-251.

Reference Web Sites

• McClary, Ben Harris. "George Washington Harris 1814-1869". The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture. 2002. Tennessee Historical Society and The University of Tennessee Press. http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=H025.

Last updated on Dec 21, 2009.