Barbara Grizzuti Harrison - Early Life

Early Life

Barbara Grizzuti was born in Queens, New York City, on 14 September 1934. Her parents were first-generation Americans; her grandparents were immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. She later described her childhood as deeply troubled. Her mother, who apparently suffered from mental illness, was emotionally distant and insisted on describing herself as "Barbara's relative", not her mother. Near the end of her life Harrison also revealed that her father had sexually abused her. The turmoil of her childhood would have a strong influence on her writing.

When Harrison was 9, she and her mother were converted by a Jehovah's Witness missionary who visited the family. Harrison's father and brother did not convert, and this caused a rift in the household. Harrison's mother immersed herself totally in her new faith, even making a pact with a Witness man to marry after Harrison's father had perished in the last judgement. Harrison later said that the Witnesses' bloody visions of apocalypse both stimulated her imagination and made her frightened to use it.

A precocious student, Harrison skipped several grades in school. As a teenager at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, Harrison fell in love with Arnold Horowitz, an English teacher who was among the first to encourage her writing talent. He apparently returned her feelings, and although their relationship remained platonic, they continued to see each other and to correspond until Horowitz's death in the late 1960s.

After graduating from high school, Harrison, who had been forbidden to attend university, went to live and work at the Watchtower headquarters of Bethel. However, her friendship with Horowitz scandalised her colleagues. Nathan H. Knorr, then head of the Watchtower Society, told Harrison to stop seeing Horowitz, but she was unable to do so.

The relationship was but one symptom of a growing conflict between Harrison's faith and her artistic sensibilities, which eventually led to a nervous breakdown. At age 22, Harrison left Bethel, and very shortly afterward she renounced her faith altogether.

Harrison found work as a publisher's secretary and became involved in the bohemian life of Greenwich Village. She had a turbulent three-year affair with an African-American jazz trumpeter whom she never publicly named. Through him, Harrison associated with many of the leading jazz musicians of the day, including Ben Webster, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. "Jazzman", as Harrison called her lover in her autobiography, would come back into her life nearly 40 years later; the two would resume their affair with undiminished passion and conflict until a second, and final, break-up.

In 1960 Barbara Grizzuti married W. Dale Harrison, an aid worker for Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). The couple spent the eight years of their marriage living in Tripoli, Mumbai, Hyderabad, India, and Chichicastenango. The Harrisons had a son, Joshua, and a daughter, Anna. They divorced in 1968, and Barbara returned to New York with the children.