Harris, Dale, 1928-1996

Dale Harris was a preeminent dance critic who lectured on a wide variety of topics including ballet, cultural history, and opera.

Stanley Dale Harris, born on November 16, 1928 in the U.K., was a prolific writer and arts lecturer who wrote on a wide variety of subjects including literature, opera, art, and dance history, fostering a reputation as the preeminent dance critic at the Wall Street Journal and a music critic for The Washington Post. A popular lecturer on ballet, cultural history, and opera, Harris lectured for several preeminent cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Opera Guild. An active member of the dance-critic community, he also served as the President of the Dance Critics Association and the General Editor of the Da Capo Dance Reprint Series during the 1980s. Harris received his Doctorate in 1965 and his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1958 after emigrating from his native England. In the 1960s and 1970s, he taught English Literature at Harvard and Stanford University, and later moved on to teach Dance History at New York University and English Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. In the early 1970s, Harris ultimately settled at Cooper Union where he taught Art History and Humanities courses for 21 years. He also held various public lectures at Princeton University, the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Opera Guild, and Christie's on a number of cultural and art historical topics from the 1970s to the 1990s. In addition to teaching, Harris wrote for numerous magazines, newspapers, and specialized journals. His publications include articles and reviews in Ballet Review, Ballet News, Dancing Times, The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times Book Review, a number of articles for newspapers including the New York Times, the London Observer, he also wrote dance and music entries for the Encyclopedia of Dance and Ballet. Dale Harris worked as an arts critic for several television and radio stations, such as WHRB, the Harvard student radio station. Catalog advertisements for sets of CD's and tapes based on his opera talks, which became best sellers at the Metropolitan Opera, are found in this collection. Harris also wrote a novel Home Fires Burning, which is not present in this collection. Dale Harris died of complications from AIDS on March 14, 1996.

...