A Born Writer: Juanita Harrison and Her Beautiful World

The first biography of a best-selling travel writer dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, freedom, and experience

Despite the challenges she faced as an average southern Black woman of her time, Juanita Harrison transcended expectations, earning a unique place in African American and literary history. Over the course of more than four decades, she traveled constantly, first throughout the US and then throughout the world. To fund her trips, she took on short-term jobs as housekeeper, cook, and nurse, never committing to any one household. Always on the move, she made it a rule to travel alone, and she had a penchant for ＂passing,＂ not as white but as local. Her wanderlust was less aspirational and upwardly mobile than dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, freedom, and experience. ＂It’s my life to see and enjoy,＂ she declared.

In 1936, she published My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, a travelogue that charts her life between 1927 and 1935. A compilation of letters she sent to friends, employers, and patrons during her travels, the book was an immediate success, running through nine printings within ten months and becoming a bestseller for that year. The illustrious Atlantic Monthly published excerpts, the book was reviewed in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and it attracted a remarkably diverse readership, sparking the enthusiasm of Black working-class library patrons, white women’s book clubs, Japanese American journalists, Harlem Renaissance luminaries, and many others. It came back into print in 1996, ensuring her legacy would endure.

A Born Writer is the first biography of this fascinating woman who found a uniquely rewarding way to live and work that many would envy today. Combining micro histories, literary criticism, and biography--and despite limited archival records--Cathryn Halverson skillfully traces Harrison from her birth in the bitterly divided South to her death in Hawai’i, tracking her varied experiences along the way in New York, Havana, Paris, Madrid, Cairo, Mumbai, Kobe, Buenos Aires, and many other places. The resulting portrait shows a woman who transcended all kinds of borders--political, social, and cultural--to experience a freedom rarely available to women, and especially women of color, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, an achievement that continues to resonate.

CATHRYN HALVERSON Cathryn Halverson is senior lecturer in English and American Literature at Södertörn University. She is the author of Faraway Women and The Atlantic Monthly, which won the Thomas J. Lyon Book Award from the Western Literature Association; Playing House in the American West: Western Women’s Life Narratives, 1889-1987; and Maverick Autobiographies: Women Writers and the American West, 1902-1936. Her scholarship has appeared in College Literature, Western American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Journal X, and American Studies.