John Harris

Classicist, Celticist, novelist, baseball historian, peanut farmer...

John Harris holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (major in Classical Studies) from the University of Texas at Austin. In completing his doctoral dissertation on Homer and Virgil, he followed a far more traditional course than the politically active Comp Lit programs of the 1980's countenanced—and his professional experiences soon brought home to him what a hostile place the late twentieth-century academy had become to love of literature and respect for the Western heritage. His career took him to several colleges throughout the Southeast without ever bringing him to a comfortable resting point. Having taught English and Latin for the past decade at the University of Texas at Tyler, he plans to retire with his wife Juanita to a farm in North Georgia where he can cultivate, not just food for the table, but independence from “a lunatic world of utopian daydreaming and sectarian headhunting.”

Yet the difficult years of navigating ivory corridors were not without inspiration. Harris devoted much of the new millennium to operating The Center for Literate Values and its online quarterly journal, Praesidium. The burden of sustaining this 501c3 at last became too great; but today John can look back over his decades of contributing to the journal and find ample material to cull for e-books well suited to Amazon’s Kindle program. It is his hope that these publications, as they appear one by one, will keep alive the Center’s vision of “nourishing the thoughtful individual and elevating imperishable, humane values above passionate hysteria and cynical egotism”—a vision that is only utopian if the West is doomed to lose 2,500 years of culture.

Harris does not align himself narrowly with any particular Christian denomination, but rather embraces the idea of a supreme moral being who inspires in us a willingness to sacrifice and, in our better moments, a disdain for selfish interest. In this regard he is also a cultural conservative; but the “c” word sometimes makes him fidget when used by the legionnaires of Ayn Rand or by exploitative corporatists who work through big government to secure monopolies.

All idealism and ideology aside, John is a devoted student of the game of baseball. His Amazon book about “batsmanship in the Deadball Era” is the result of five years' intensive research and perhaps twenty years of back-yard experimentation. Retirement opens new possibilities here. Besides growing almonds and pecans, John wants to teach young people the secrets he has learned about “how shorter, broader frames can devise strategies for success in the game that seldom work for taller body types". His son Owen was a devastating sidearm reliever in college... and the two are talking about collaborating on a book about this unique pitching style. A Wordpress site tightly condensing all of their work for the benefit of more compact physiques--titled "Small Ball Success"--already exists (https://smallballsuccess.com).