Mark Harris, best known for his baseball novels including Bang the Drum Slowly, which was made into a popular movie, has died. He was 84.

Harris died Wednesday in a Santa Barbara, Calif., hospital a month after breaking his hip in a fall and contracting pneumonia. He also had Alzheimer's disease.

Aside from 1956's Bang the Drum Slowly, Harris's other ball novels include 1953's The Southpaw, 1957's A Ticket for Seamstitch and 1979's It Looked Like Forever.

In each book, Harris's character Henry Wiggen, the ace left-handed pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths, tells the story and takes part in the action.

Wiggen is "every bit as permanent and important as Huckleberry Finn, as Ishmael and Ahab in Moby Dick and as Nick Adams in Hemingway's short stories," said Cordelia Candelaria, author of Seeking the Perfect Game: Baseball in American Literature.

'I can't stand fantasy, especially in baseball. … baseball has to be done right.'—Late author Mark Harris

Bang the Drum Slowly is on Sports Illustrated's list of the 100 best sports books.

The 1973 movie version starred Michael Moriarty as Wiggen and Robert De Niro as catcher Bruce Pearson, who is dying of Hodgkin's disease.

Stories have universal appeal

The tragicomic tale was first adapted for the small screen in 1956, in a live segment of The U.S. Steel Hour, and starred  Paul Newman as Wiggen and Albert Salmi as Pearson.

Harris was praised for capturing life in the dugout, but also for the universality of the stories.

"Henry Wiggen struggles with his individuality, his place in society and the moral dilemmas he faces. All of those struggles are as much about him as an American character as they are about baseball," Candelaria said.

Harris, also an expert on Quebec-born Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, wrote a total of 13 novels and five non-fiction books.

Loved baseball since childhood

Born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Harris earned a doctorate in English literature  and taught English at universities in Minnesota, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Tempe, Ariz.

His non-fiction books included Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck, an unofficial biography of the author.

He also wrote City of Discontent: An Interpretive Biography of Vachel Lindsay and Mark the Glove Boy, or The Last Days of Richard Nixon.

Diamond, a collection of Harris's baseball essays over nearly a half-century, was published in 1994.

Harris loved baseball all his life.

"I can't stand fantasy, especially in baseball," he told the Los Angeles Times in a 1994 interview.

"It has to be real for me. I think people make fantasy of it who don't know how it works realistically. That is a demand I made when I was a kid — that baseball has to be done right."

Harris is survived by his wife of 61 years, Josephine Horen, his sons, Henry and Anthony, his daughter, Hester Harris, a sister, Martha Harris and three grandchildren.

 

With files from the Associated Press