They divorced in 1968, and Barbara returned to New York with the children.īy now Harrison had become involved with the women's movement, and she began writing on feminist themes for various publications. The Harrisons had a son, Joshua, and a daughter, Anna. The couple spent the eight years of their marriage living in Tripoli, Mumbai, Hyderabad, India, and Chichicastenango. Dale Harrison, an aid worker for Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE). "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. Through him, Harrison associated with many of the leading jazz musicians of the day, including Ben Webster, Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. She had a turbulent three-year affair with an African-American jazz trumpeter whom she never publicly named. Harrison found work as a publisher's secretary and became involved in the bohemian life of Greenwich Village. At the age of 22, Harrison left the facility, and very shortly afterward renounced her faith altogether. 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. Knorr, then head of the Watchtower Society, told Harrison to stop seeing Horowitz, but she was unable to do so. Her friendship with Horowitz scandalised her colleagues there Nathan H. 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.Īfter graduating from high school, Harrison, who had been forbidden to attend university, went to live and work at the Jehovah's Witness world headquarters, the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society in Brooklyn Heights.
As a teenager at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn, she fell in love with Arnold Horowitz, an English teacher who was among the first to encourage her writing talent. Harrison later said that the Witnesses' bloody visions of apocalypse both stimulated her imagination and made her frightened to use it.Ī precocious student, Harrison skipped several grades in school. 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 Judgment. Harrison's father and brother did not convert, and this caused a rift in the household.
When Harrison was nine years old, she and her mother were converted by a Jehovah's Witness missionary who visited the family.
The turmoil of her childhood would have a strong influence on her writing. Near the end of her life Harrison also claimed that her father had sexually abused her. Her mother, who apparently suffered from mental illness, was emotionally distant and insisted on describing herself as "Barbara's relative", not her mother. She later described her childhood as deeply troubled. Her parents were first-generation Americans her grandparents were immigrants from Calabria in Southern Italy. She is best known for her autobiographical work, particularly her account of growing up as a Jehovah's Witness, and for her travel writing.īarbara Grizzuti was born in Queens, New York City, on September 14, 1934. Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (Septem– April 24, 2002) was an American journalist, essayist and memoirist.