Harry Harrison - Personal Life

Personal Life

Harrison was born as Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Stamford, Connecticut. His father, Henry Leo Dempsey, a printer who was partly of Irish descent, changed his name to Harrison soon after Harry was born — although Harry did not know this himself until he was 30 years old, at which point he changed his name to Harry Max Harrison in court. His mother, Ria H. (Kirjassoff), was Russian Jewish. She had been born in Riga, Latvia, but she grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Incidentally, her brother, Max David Kirjassoff (1888-1923), had been an American consul in Japan, but he died along with his wife Alice during the huge earthquake in Yokohama and Tokyo in 1923.

Harrison resided in many parts of the world including Mexico, England, Ireland, Denmark, and Italy. He was an advocate of Esperanto (which he learned, according to Christopher Priest, out of boredom during military service). The language often appears in his novels, particularly in his Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld series, and had been the honorary president of the Esperanto Association of Ireland, as well as holding memberships in other Esperanto organizations such as Esperanto-USA (formerly the "Esperanto League for North America"), of which he was an honorary member, and the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (World Esperanto Association), of whose Honorary Patrons' Committee he was a member.

After finishing Forest Hills High School in 1943, Harrison was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II as a gunsight technician and as a gunnery instructor. Priest adds that he became a sharpshooter, a military policeman, and a specialist in the prototypes of computer-aided bomb-sights and gun turrets. "But overall the army experience vested in him a hatred of the military that was to serve him well as a writer later on." Then he returned to civilian life in the United States.

He enrolled in Hunter College in New York in 1946, and later ran a studio selling illustrations to comics and science fiction magazines.

Harrison married Joan Merkler Harrison in 1954 in New York City, and their marriage lasted until her death of cancer in 2002. They had two children, Todd (born in 1955) and Moira (born in 1959), to whom he dedicated his novel Make Room! Make Room!. Harrison had been previously married to Evelyn Harrison, but that marriage ended in 1951. Evelyn married the science fiction writer Lester del Rey shortly afterwards. She was included in a cartoon that Harrison drew of the Hydra Club in 1950.

Priest writes that Harrison made many household moves abroad:

As the market for comics began to shrink, and then expire, Harrison started writing for science-fiction magazines. The paltry financial rewards led him ... to move from New York. The chance came with what seemed at the time like a large payment from a magazine for his first full-length novel, Deathworld. He drove his family in an antiquated camper van to Mexico and remained there for a year.It was the first of many international moves, something that became characteristic. He went from Mexico to Britain, then to Italy, then to Denmark. He liked Denmark and stayed for seven years, seeing it as a perfect place to bring up his children, but eventually he realised that unless he made a conscious decision to leave, they could easily remain there for ever. The family moved back to the US, to San Diego, California, where he reckoned heating bills would be low, but by the mid-1970s he was back in the UK.

After many years of moving around and raising children, too, he spent his latter years residing in Ireland. Because Harrison had an Irish grandparent, he was able to assume citizenship, and by taking advantage of the Irish scheme for writers, he enjoyed tax-free status. He kept an apartment in Brighton for his frequent visits to England. When Joan died in 2002, his British home became permanent.

Harrison's Web site announced his death on August 15, 2012 at his apartment in Brighton, England.