Stephen harrigan biography

Note: Additional Stephen Harrigan archives have been received since this on-line inventory was compiled. Contact the archivist for the latest information on our holdings. After receiving a degree in English from The University of Texas at Austin in , Harrigan briefly attended graduate school and worked as a yardman and as an ad writer for the University Co-op.

He became a regular writer for Texas Monthly shortly after its inception and co-founded and edited Lucille, a journal of poetry, which published 10 issues between and Harrigan received a Dobie-Paisano fellowship in , which allowed him to complete his first novel. Aransas, published by Knopf in , tells the story of Jeff Dowling, an alienated young man who comes to terms with himself and the world as he trains two dolphins for a circus in Port Aransas, Texas.

The New York Times named the novel one of the notable books of , and reviewers praised its realism and style. His second novel, Jacob's Well, also focused on man's relationship with nature, following the lives of three people who are drawn together to explore an artesian well in Central Texas.

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Harrigan's recent books, until the publication in of Gates of the Alamo, have been nonfiction. As a freelance writer and later staff writer and editor for Texas Monthly, Harrigan displayed a talent for journalism, contributing interviews and other investigative pieces, but he also focused on the natural environment, writing about rivers, Big Bend, Padre Island and other Texas landmarks.

His book Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef combined research on aquatic life with his own experiences scuba diving off a coral reef in the Caribbean. Harrigan's works are characterized by an intense interest in humans and their relationship to the environment around them.

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He once wrote of his interest in natural subjects: "I don't know what nature is exactly--whether it is a category that includes human beings or shuts them out--but for me it has always contained that hint of eeriness, the sense that some vital information--common knowledge to all the universe--has been specifically withheld from me. Sometimes, as with the snake, this secrecy has seemed malevolent, but far more often it has been wonderfully tantalizing.

For much of my life I have been obsessed with nature, but not in the way a naturalist would be obsessed with it--driven to classify, to define relationships, to comprehend the world's marvelous intricacy.