Thomas Harris

Thomas Harris grew up in Rich, Mississippi. After graduating high school, he attended Baylor University, where he studied English. In college, Harris was a reporter for the Waco Tribune-Herald, where he covered stories about local law enforcement. While in school, Harris met and married Harriet Haley, who he would divorce in 1968. After college, he lived in New York City for some time while writing for the Associated Press and working on his debut novel, Black Sunday. In 1975, Harris published Black Sunday, a thriller about a terrorist plot to drop a bomb at the Super Bowl. The book did reasonably well, and Harris followed it up six years later with Red Dragon, the first of his novels to feature his most famous and notorious character: Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal Lecter is a psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial killer. His mix of intelligence, charm, and menace was a massive hit with audiences. After Red Dragon, all of Harris’s fiction became Hannibal-focused. He published The Silence of the Lambs—his most famous work—in 1988, Hannibal in 1999, and Hannibal Rising in 2006. There are several well-known and respected adaptations of Harris’s work, including Jonathan Demme’s film, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), and NBC’s Hannibal (2013–2015). In 2019, Harris published his first non-Hannibal novel since Black Sunday, titled Cari Mora.