Noted children's author David Harrison reflects on writing career, journey in 'This Life'

David Harrison has written about a boy with a drum, bullfrogs who sing, and a little turtle looking for a new home.

But in the autobiographical "This Life," available now for pre-ordering, the Ozarks native and biologist examines his journey to become an award-winning poet and children's author.

He explores how a love of reading and nature and an enduring fascination with anything that slithers, buzzes or barks resulted in more than 100 published books — all for children or classroom teachers.

"I have spent a lifetime as a writer pulling from knowledge of and love for living things, animals in particular, but all living things, plants too," Harrison said Monday in his southeast Springfield home. "To me, that is where some of that began. It had something to do with shaping me."

Harrison's picture books, poems and guided readers have sold more than 10 million copies and been translated into a dozen languages. His stack of book medals started with the Christopher Award in 1972. The most recent was the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 2020.

His name appears on a Springfield elementary school and a conference room at The Library Center. He remains an in-demand public speaker on writing and literacy, giving talks from Washington D.C. to Malaysia.

At 85, Harrison is still a prolific book writer. "There are five others in the pipeline that will be out between this year and 2024."

He did not set out to write an autobiography. His intent, one year ago, was to draw on life experiences to craft his first "one-man dramatic reading" for the stage.

"Once I got into it, I thought I'm not famous enough to be doing this. I need to be a Brad Pitt," he joked, noting his wife worked with the future actor during her years as a Springfield counselor. "But I just felt the need to finish it once I got started. It seemed like the reasonable thing to do."

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What he ended up with was, in part, a love letter to his family, to Springfield, and to the joy of writing.

"I hope that those who might have an interest in writing for young people will see something about my own journey that might give them some guidelines, some ideas about their own," Harrison said. "I hope that librarians, teachers, others who are interested in children's literature will find in it something of value in getting better acquainted with one of the writers who've had some success over half a century in the field."

'He's a major figure in the Ozarks'

"This Life" was published by the Ozarks Studies Institute, an initiative of the Missouri State University Libraries, seeking to preserve Ozarks history and culture.

Other books in the series focused on Horton Smith, the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas, and springs in the Ozarks and beyond.

Tom Peters, dean of library services at MSU, said publishing Harrison's autobiography made sense. "He's a major figure in the Ozarks."

"His life and his writings somehow, in some way ... reflect the Ozarks. He's like one of us," Peters said.

"Here's this person who 'done good' and he arose from the Ozarks and that is worth celebrating and documenting and preserving."

The autobiography includes personal photos, poems and excerpts from his other published works.

Harrison's story starts in Springfield. His father's work briefly took the family to Arizona but they returned. He attended Oak Grove Elementary, Jarrett Junior High School and Central High School.

He served as student body president while studying biology and geology at Drury University. He earned a scholarship to Emory University in Atlanta for his master's degree.

Harrison has been married for 63 years to Sandy, his high school and college sweetheart. They have two children, Jeff and Robin, and two grandchildren, Kris and Tyler.

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'Some things happened along the way'

In the book, Harrison explains how boundless curiosity, hard work and calculated risks led to his decades-long career with words.

"Some things happened along the way that directed me to where I wound up," he said, offering a few examples.

At age 3, after watching a dog tussle with a black snake, he picked the snake up and tossed it.

"That stuck in my head as an early memory where I had an interest, and little fear, toward something living, something biological," he said. "That snake thing stuck with me all through college."

In third grade, for a 4H project, he started collecting and cataloging insects. That later led to a summer internship at the University of Missouri in Columbia.

"All these pieces fed into my growing interest in and appreciation for nature," he said.

Harrison had scribbled out a few poems, sketched cartoons and written book reports but when he was forced to take a creative writing course his final year at Drury, he was petrified.

That class, he said, changed his life. A professor explained to him that even scientists and researchers ought to know how to write.

In one story, he wrote about a spider and a wasp getting into a fight and was told, much to his astonishment, that he had "the makings of a writer."

'I made all the mistakes you can probably make'

Despite being bitten by the writing bug in college, Harrison stayed the course. He pursued a career in science, started a family and worked demanding jobs.

He wrote, often at night, while employed at a pharmaceutical company in Indiana, editing greeting cards for Hallmark in Kansas City, and running the Glenstone Block Company in Springfield that his father started, along with partners, after World War II.

"I ran it for 35 years but I wrote at night until I eventually sold the company in 2008, and then I could write full-time," he said. "It took me from 1959 to 2008 to become a full-time writer and (then) I wrote from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week and I've never been happier."

In recent years, after his wife retired, he scaled back to seven-hour days, only writing from 6 a.m. to 1 p.m. so they can spend more time together.

Success did not come quickly. Harrison admits his dream was to be the next great American novelist, a John Updike or Ernest Hemingway. "Either one would be fine," he joked.

"But that didn't work. They had those markets cornered," he recalled realizing early on. "So I wrote short stories. I got pretty good at it but it wasn't going to be a career anytime soon."

With no formal training or background in marketing his work, Harrison floundered until the late 1960s. "At that point, I'd been rejected 67 times."

"I made all the mistakes you can probably make and then invented a few," he recalled.

He achieved only marginal success until "The Boy with a Drum" — a Little Golden Book published in 1969 — and, soon after, "Little Turtle's Big Adventures."

"When I discovered that I had written a picture book, that was quite a revelation. And it sold 2 million copies," he said. "I thought 'Forget Updike, maybe I'm a children's writer, who knows?' So I tried another book and that one was read on Captain Kangaroo and hailed as a good book for ecology. Of course, it was about animals."

He earned his first national book award for "The Book of Giant Stories" in the early 1970s.

"I didn't know what that meant," he said. "I just knew that I was happy and I was doing what I wanted to do."

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Many awards and much success followed. He later worked with the Scholastic Book Club to write four books in the Clifford the Big Red Dog series.

One of Harrison's poems is sandblasted into a library sidewalk in Arizona. Another is on a bookmobile in Colorado.

'Something that amuses me or catches my interest'

As the love for Harrison's books grew, he spent more time in elementary schools. Most of his books are targeted for grades 3-6.

"I've been in schools all over the country, visiting students, answering their questions, telling them about writing and talking to the teachers, asking them what I can do to help reinforce what they are doing," he said.

"Over the years, I got involved in education and it just reinforced my appreciation for the classroom, what goes on there, and it just seems natural."

Harrison said when he writes for adults it is almost always for teachers.

In Springfield, visits to public schools spurred Harrison to get more hands-on. He helped establish the Foundation for Springfield Public Schools, which raises private money to support student learning, and the annual banquet celebrating teachers.

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He produced a book of local student and teacher quotes in response to the prompt "What I've learned so far ..." in an effort to inspire young writers and raise awareness of the foundation.

In the 1980s, Harrison was elected to the Springfield school board, serving six years. As part of the state accreditation process, the district's book collections were found lacking.

"We raised money to put elementary school libraries all over town," he said. "I was enormously pleased about that."

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Harrison led a campaign to raise money to replenish school libraries. His initiatives "Reading Roundup" and "Sky High on Reading," encouraged reading and collected donations of money and library books.

He later started "Ozarks Family Voices," a free program for families with young children that recorded parents and others reading beloved books.

Harrison started a blog and has posted more than 4,000 times. The site has been visited more than 370,000 times by individuals across the U.S. and in other countries.

He visits the David Harrison Elementary, opened in 2009, at least twice a year. He is often asked to talk to children who want to write or to aspiring children's authors.

"My advice to people beginning is do write all kinds of things until you finally figure out which one fits best because until you do, you can be close and not get there," Harrison said. "Even now I like to occasionally write something that has no place to go, it's just something that amuses me or catches my interest."

Want to buy the book?

"This Life" is available for pre-order now through the Ozarks Studies Institute, an initiative of Missouri State University. The website is: ozarksstudies.missouristate.edu.

The local printing will be in time for the gift-buying season in December. Early next year, the books will be available on Amazon and other major bookstores.

Claudette Riley covers education for the News-Leader. Email tips and story ideas to criley@news-leader.com.

This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Noted children's author David Harrison pens 'This Life' autobiography