Harris, Elizabeth Merwin Page, 1889-1969.

Elizabeth Merwin Page Harris, author, graduated from Vassar College (1912) and received an M.A. from Columbia University (1914). She was a teacher (1914-1916), Y.M.C.A. worker during World War I, and an International Grenfell Association volunteer (1921-1925) and secretary (1927-1931). Elizabeth Page wrote four books, including the 1939 best seller, The Tree of Liberty. She married Herbert Taylor Harris (1879-1960) in 1954. Harris died in 1969.

From the description of Elizabeth Page Harris papers, 1808-1978 (inclusive), 1907-1969 (bulk). (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 702206605

Elizabeth Merwin Page Harris, author, graduated from Vassar College (1912) and received an M.A. from Columbia University (1914). She was a teacher (1914-1916), Y.M.C.A. worker during World War I, and an International Grenfell Association volunteer (1921-1925) and secretary (1927-1931). Elizabeth Page wrote four books, including the 1939 best seller, The Tree of Liberty. She married Herbert Taylor Harris (1879-1960) in 1954. Harris died in 1969.

Elizabeth Page sold the film rights for The Tree of Liberty to Columbia Pictures in 1939 for $55,000. The resulting movie, starring Cary Grant and Martha Scott, was called "The Howards of Virginia" (1940). A final book, Wilderness Adventure, which the author characterized as a "penny dreadful", was published in 1946. For most of the last thirty years of her life, Elizabeth Page devoted her writing energies to a monumental two volume life of Thomas Jefferson titled Heritage and Challenge . The first volume of this labor of love concerned Jefferson's Virginia between the years 1612-1739 and the second volume covered his life to 1766. The work suffered from what one editor considered "iffiness" and what others called conjecture and creative fiction. Occupying a neverland between scholarly biography and historical fiction, the manuscript was rejected by commercial publishers and university presses.

During World War II Elizabeth Page became active in Quaker and pacifist causes. She was a member of the Orange Grove Monthly Meeting in Pasadena, California, was concerned with the refugee work of the American Friends Service Committee, and served in the Philadelphia office of the Committee at the International Centers Subcommittee, Foreign Service Section 1945-1947. In 1940 she was on the Council of Advisors and served as lecturer for Federal Union, Inc., originally called Inter-Democracy Federal Unionists.

After her mother's death in Sierra Madre, California in September 1943, she moved to the family home in Manchester, Vermont, where she resided for much of the rest of her life. She married Dr. Herbert Taylor Harris (1879-1960) of Basin, Wyoming in December 1954 and died on March 11, 1969 in Oaxaca, Mexico of "lymphatic leukemia" from which she had suffered for fifteen years.

Additional biographical information can be found in Series II of the Elizabeth Page Harris Papers (Box 30, folders 719-31).

From the guide to the Elizabeth Page Harris papers, 1808-1978, (Manuscripts and Archives)