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Stephen
L. Harris grew up in a writing family where chatter around the
dinner table centered on newspaper reporters and editors, the classic
stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, L. Frank Baum, Rudyard Kipling
and Mark Twain, and the heartland poems of James Whitcomb Riley.
His grandfather and two great uncles began their newspaper careers
on the legendary Kansas City Star in the early 1900s, where they
were colleagues of Ernest Hemingway, Russel Crouse and the illustrator
Ralph Barton. Later, Steve's grandfather served as foreign editor
of the old New York Herald and then started his own Manhattan advertising
agency. One of his great uncles worked on the New York Daily News
and then turned to writing short stories and poems. The other great
uncle, the illustrator Raeburn Van Buren, drew over 350 stories
for The Saturday Evening Post and a like number for Collier's magazine
before creating, with Al Capp, the comic strip "Abbie an'
Slats."
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Steve started his own career as a reporter for
his hometown newspaper, The Wilton Bulletin, a weekly in suburban
Fairfield County, Conn. He then edited its sister newspaper, The
Redding Pilot, worked in Vermont as a political reporter for The
Burlington Free Press and was an editor for WCAX-TV, the CBS affiliate
in Vermont. He also spent six years as public relations director
for Champlain College, also in Burlington, and then joined the
General Electric Company.
.jpg) For
12 years, he edited GE's award-winning, company-wide magazine,
Monogram. With a circulation of more than 330,000, Monogram went
to employees and retirees around the world. During his tenure as
editor, he covered the Jack Welch revolution, communicating the
CEO's vision to all employees. His work carried him to the four
corners of the globe, wherever GE had a presence. GE's vice president
of marketing, Len Vickers, who in the early 1980s brought to the
multinational company the famous slogan "We Bring Good Things
to Life" and later served Xerox as its senior vice president
of marketing, called Steve the "Studs Terkel of U.S. corporate
writers." Steve believes the editorship of Monogram was the
best corporate writing job in all of America.
After leaving GE in 1991, he was the senior writer
on three best-selling CD-ROM histories of the .jpg) Olympic
Games. One of the histories, "Olympic Gold: A 100 Year History
of the Summer Olympic Games," won the 1996 Gold Milia d'Or
Award at the Cannes Film Festival as "Best Reference Title
in the World." Steve then wrote his first book, "100
Golden Olympians." Sponsored by the Xerox Corporation for
the United States Olympic Committee, this book honored America's
greatest living Olympic champions on the eve of the 100th anniversary
of the Modern Games. Steve received an honorary gold medal from
the USOC and Xerox for his work. Afterward, he was associate editor
and editor of the Journal of Olympic History, the official publication
of the International Society of Olympic Historians.
In 1998, he began researching "Duty, Honor,
Privilege." That book is now part of a new series by Potomac
Books, entitled The History of War. It joins other books, including "The
Story of the Second World War" by the eminent historian, the
late Henry Steele Commager.
After completing "Harlem's Hell Fighters" in
2003, Steve is now at work on a third book about New York City's
National Guard regiments in the First World War. He lives in Weybridge,
Vermont, with his wife, Sue.
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