Mark Harris is an American journalist and author. He is best known as writer of the book Pictures at a Revolution, and as a columnist and former executive editor of Entertainment Weekly. He is also known for his 2014 book Five Came Back, which was turned into the Netflix series of the same name. Harris is married to the playwright Tony Kushner. Harris has also written for The New York Times, Fortune, the Guardian, Grantland, and Slate. Harris remains a columnist for Entertainment Weekly, writing "The Final Cut." In July 2012, Harris wrote the magazine's cover story on coming out in Hollywood. He reviewed 'Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade' by Justin Spring in the New York Times on August 26, 2010. Harris graduated from Yale University in 1985.
Books
In 2008, Harris published Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, an examination of how the American film industry changed with the 1960s. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, the author Jim Shepard called the book "full of pleasures... He seems to have talked to virtually everyone who’s still around, and to great effect... Mark Harris's legwork and intelligence transport us gratefully back to that exhilarating moment when it was all still about to occur." In February 2014, Harris published Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. The work is an examination of five U.S. film directors — John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, George Stevens — and their frontline work during the Second World War. The book was well received, with The New York Times calling it, "a tough-minded, information-packed and irresistibly readable work." The trade publication Booklist wrote, "It's hardly news that the movies affect and are affected by the broader canvas of popular culture and world history, but Harris — perhaps more successfully than any other writer, past or present — manages to find in that symbiotic relationship the stuff of great stories," calling the book, "narrative nonfiction that is as gloriously readable as it is unfailingly informative." In 2017, the book was adapted into a three-part Netflix docu-series Five Came Back.
Personal life
Harris is married to the playwright Tony Kushner. In attendance at the couple's May 2003 wedding were director George C. Wolfe, playwright Larry Kramer, Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer, actresses Linda Emond and Kathleen Chalfant, and, The New York Times reported, "dozens of aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, many of them crying." The couple's marriage was the first same-sex commitment ceremony to be featured in the Vows column of The New York Times. In the summer of 2008, they were legally married at the city hall in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
