Background

Harriet Doerr was born as Harriet Green Huntington on April 8, 1910, in Pasadena, California. She was the granddaughter of California railroad magnate and noted collector of art and rare books, Henry Edwards Huntington. Harriet was the third of six children and two step-children grew up in a family that encouraged intellectual endeavors, curiosity, independent thought, and open opinion, that relished controversy and spirited argument, honing the talent for finding the exact word.

Education

Harriet Doerr studied at Polytechnic and Westridge schools in Pasadena. Then she attended Smith College from 1927 to 1928 before transferring to Stanford University for two years. Harriet left the University and got married. It was Doerr's son Michael who teased her into returning to college in 1975, three years after the death of her husband. Finally, Harriet Doerr went back to Stanford, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in European History in 1977. Although the bachelor's degree she received was in history, Doerr had also taken the Creative Writing Program (1978-1984) under Wallace Stegner and found she liked writing.

Career

In 1930, Harriet left the University, married Albert Doerr Jr., and the young couple settled in Pasadena to stay there for the next twenty-five years raising their two children. Things changed in the late 1950s. Albert Doerr's family owned a copper mine in Mexico, and the Doerrs moved there to restore the mine. They remained there until 1972 when Albert died from leukemia and she returned to California.

Doerr took writing classes at Scripps College from 1975 to 1976 and then went back to Stanford, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1977. While at Stanford Harriet impressed her writing teachers that they urged her to stay on to study in one of the country's most renowned creative writing programs. She began writing, earned a Stegner Fellowship in 1979, and was named the Wallace Stegner Fellow (1980-1981). She soon began publishing short stories. Doerr drew on her experiences with her husband when they lived in Mexico to pen the novels Stones for Ibarra (1984) and Consider This, Señora (1993), as well as to write the stories collected in her 1990 work Under the Aztec Sun. Her last book, a collection of short stories and essays The Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions was published in 1995. A television adaptation of Stones for Ibarra was presented by Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1988.

Doerr's eyesight was dramatically impaired by glaucoma and scar tissue. She had tunnel vision in one eye and only peripheral vision in the other but she still accepted most invitations to speak at graduations, cultural events, and fund-raisers. On her 87th birthday, Harriet was one of the guest authors at a fund-raising program sponsored by the Associates of the Stanford University Libraries at Stanford.

Though Doerr began her writing career late in life, she was praised by critics for her artful and meticulous writing style, a talent that garnered her many awards, from the American Book Award to prizes from the PEN Center, United States West, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Commonwealth Club of California. In the last decade of her life, Harriet Doerr was legally blind from glaucoma. She died of complications from a broken hip on November 24, 2002, in Pasadena.

Achievements

• Harriet Doerr has been listed as a notable writer by Marquis Who's Who. She is an award-winning author of Stones for Ibarra (1984), Consider This, Señora (1993), Under the Aztec Sun (1990), and The Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions (1995).
  
  Harriet earned her Bachelor of Arts when she was 67 years old as well as her first novel Stones for Ibarra was published when Doerr was 74 years old. She received many awards and honors including the American Book Award for First Work of Fiction and was named the Wallace Stegner Fellow (1980-1981). A television adaptation of Stones for Ibarra was presented by Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1988.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Tiger in the Grass: Stories and Other Inventions

    (In this collection of stories and pieces, Harriet Doerr e...)

    1995
  • Stones for Ibarra

    (Richard and Sara Everton, just over and just under forty,...)

    1984
  • Consider This, Senora

    (The long-awaited and highly praised second novel by the a...)

    1993
  • Under The Aztec Sun 1990

Views

Although Doerr's eyesight was dramatically impaired by glaucoma she still accepted most invitations to speak at graduations, cultural events, and fund-raisers. In 1997 Harriet was back on Stanford campus as one of the guest authors at a fund-raising program sponsored by the Associates of the Stanford University Libraries. It happened to be her 87th birthday.

When Harriet Doerr was asked what was the worst possible sin she alternately named deliberate cruelty to another being and the failure to use one's talent. Doerr believed that education could restore tolerance and sanity to the world. She despised euphemism, pretension, phoniness, and hypocrisy. Harriet most valued kindness, curiosity, a sense of humor and the ridiculous, provocative ideas, and beautiful language.

Quotations: "Where you are changes you - the tree outside your window, the mountains, the lake."

"I operate from chaos and have all sorts of secret approaches to my work. I don't think I could do it with an audience. Other people don't need to be alone with their thoughts so much. I sort of starve if I don't have time alone."

"Writing derives from an accumulation of experience. It's as if you collect facts and observations over time, like a stone to stand on. From there, imagination takes over."

"The real events are like grains of sand on a huge beach of possible images."

"I do believe that, during your life, everything you do, and everyone you meet, rubs off in some way. Some bit of everything that you experience stays with everyone you've ever known, and nothing is lost. That's what's eternal, these little specks of experience in a great, enormous river that has no end."

Membership

• 

  Harriet Doerr was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta when studied at Stanford University.

  Kappa Alpha Theta , United States

Personality

When at Stanford, Doerr was old enough to be a grandmother to most of the students, but she quickly fit in with the crowd, joining them after class for beer or coffee or a hamburger. Harriet is described as a very hardworking, friendly, and hospitable person. Ron Hansen recalled: "She worked very hard, seven days a week, but about once a month, she'd clear away her typewriter and have a party for us all. There would always be baked brie and nice wine. She'd entertain us with stories about the good old days. It seemed like she'd been everywhere and knew a bit about everything."

Quotes from others about the person

• "Although Harriet Doerr had come to writing very late in life, she discovered, as we all did, that she was an almost flawless lens, with a capacity to make a world out of the fragmentary images she had caught." - Wallace Stegner.

Interests

• gardening

Connections

Harriet married Albert Edward Doerr in 1930 and they had two children, Michael and Martha. But in 1972 Albert died from cancer, a disease that also killed Harriet's parents, five of her siblings, and her son Michael (in 1995).

Son:

Michael Doerr

Daughter:

Martha Doerr Toppin

Late Husband:

Albert Edward Doerr

Grandfather:

Henry Huntington

Friend:

Ron Hansen

сolleague:

Cork Smith

Cork Smith was Doerr's editor. Smith also helped Doerr work around her vision problems.

сolleague:

John L'Heureux

сolleague:

Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner headed the Creative Writing Program and Harriet Doerr was his student.