Mrs Harris MP

Paul Gallico was born in New York City, of Italian and Austrian parentage, in 1897, and attended Columbia University. From 1922 to 1936 he worked on the New York Daily News as sports editor, columnist, and assistant managing editor. In 1936 he bought a house on top of a hill at Salcombe in South Devon and settled down with a Great Dane and twenty-three assorted cats. It was in 1941 that he made his name with The Snow Goose, a classic story of Dunkirk which became a world-wide best-seller. Having served as a gunner's mate in the U.S. Navy in 1918, he was again active as a war correspondent with the American Expeditionary Force in 1944. Paul Gallico, who later lived in Monaco, was a first-class fencer and a keen sea-fisherman. He wrote over forty books, four of which were the adventures of Mrs Harris: Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (1958), Mrs Harris Goes to New York (1959), Mrs. Harris, M.P. (1965) and Mrs Harris Goes to Moscow (1974). One of the most prolific and professional of American authors, Paul Gallico died in July 1976.

Mrs Harris is one of the great creations of fiction - so real that you feel you know her, yet truly magical as well. I can never have enough of her